Vivian Smith

An important and useful resource, as the most current attempt at a full bibliography of the works of Patrick White. At the same time, in my research for my own website on White, I have discovered multiple inaccuracies which is a disappointing, if perhaps understandable, circumstance given this was primarily compiled in the 1990s before many of the internet archives we have available today.

The main issues are incorrect dates and a some poorly located sources, although one short piece appears not to have been written by White at all, but rather Randolph Stow! There are some other annoyances in the book's layout. Newspaper reviews of works are not always listed in chronological order, which seems needlessly messy. The appendix of miscellaneous writings does not always explain what each piece is, which feels like a lost opportunity given some of these pieces are hard to track down even for the practiced researcher.

Still, the book will serve its core purpose well, with superlative bibilographical descriptions of every known edition of the novels, plays, and short story collections up to the book's publication in 2004, and useful facts such as sales figures and original prices. This would be highly useful for any library or auction house.

One hopes a second edition will come along, because - unbeknownst to the compilers - only two years after this was published, White's literary executor came forward to announce she had a trove of White papers including manuscripts, letters, unpublished works, and an unfinished novel, which was subsequently published (The Hanging Garden). The bane of the bibliographer is to be out-of-date as soon as one goes to press, but this must have been especially galling!… (meer)

The poems in this book have a quiet formality. They don't spread across the page like spider webs catching and displaying apparently random flies of perception. They aren't Chinese boxes or monkey puzzles. Neither the Ramones nor Bob Dylan are referred to even once. Iambic pentameters rule and straightforward subjects dominate: there are many arrivals in Sydney, the poet's home, and at least as many returns to Hobart, where he grew up; there are poems about poetry, poets and painters, depression, friends alive and dead. I used the word 'quiet' , and that is the overwhelming effect: quiet reminiscence, quiet elegy, quiet observation, quiet wit, even, in 'Deathbed Sketch', some quiet philippic. Something of a quiet achiever, then, and reading him is a quiet pleasure.

Incidentally, one of these poems, 'Return to Hobart', appeared in a 1971 anti-war anthology, unchanged except for much improved editing, which makes me realise that this is not a collection of new poems, but some kind of unspecified retrospective, which accounts for a sense of temporal dislocation – the poet's daughter is a little girl on one page, for instance, and quite grown up a couple of pages later; and all those comings and goings between Sydney, Hobart and the rest of the world don't have an easily discernible sequence.

From http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/not-a-68er/… (meer)