In this issue we look at new works by acclaimed English novelist Jake Arnott and Australian poet Craig Sherborne.

Johnny Come Home
Jake Arnott
Sceptre, 2006

If your idea of the 1970s is more hair than is reasonable for a human head, male pop stars painted to look like drag queens, and truly abominable fashions inspired by the gender-bending excesses of Glam Rock, then Jake Arnott's new novel is the antidote you need to remedy the situation. Johnny Come Home will set you on the right path about a decade that laid the wobbly groundwork for our age, and whose deadly implications still reverberate in the urgent present. It is, in many ways, a political novel that spins on the axis of a page-turning thriller.

Arnott is not interested in merely evoking kitsch. Rather he paints in deft, bold strokes a swinging London that is teetering on the verge of despair and anarchy. It is a London that is knowable today, because the Western world is now reaping the seeds that were sown in that not-too-distant age. The idealism of the 1960s has given way to disillusionment. Free love did not sire the promised paradise, and the old political orders have deeper roots. They are more resilient, pernicious and well structured han first thought. He aims to underline the essentials of an age and he does it through evocation and character.

Anarchist Declan O'Connell has committed suicide, leaving behind an artist boyfriend. Shattered and bewildered, Pearson wanders round in a daze, trying to hold onto a picture of his boyfriend that no longer makes sense. make the pieces fit a picture that does not quite make sense. Along the way, Pearson encounters a teenage hustler called Sweet Thing and brings him back to the squat he shares with Nina. Sweet Thing, in turn, is linked to ageing pop star Johnny Chrome. Sweet Thing, the wave of the future, is Chrome's inspiration and link to an audience that is leaving him behind.

The past is murky, they say, and no amount of effort can bring it back. This may well be true, but when an artist persists in excavating the past era and manages to link it to the present as well as Jake Arnott has done in his new novel, the efforts are worth the trouble.

Marcel Proust evoked the past by nibbling little cakes called petits madeleines. If Arnott needed to be likewise inspired, he might have found his Muse in smoking pot or tickling his nostrils with a line or two of cocaine.

Necessary Evil
Poems by Craig Sherborne
Black Inc, 2006

For quite some time, Craig Sherborne has been pouring out a torrent of poems, award-winning plays and journalism. In the intervening period he has cultivated an animated discourse with the public that owes much to his sense of Australian bluntness. Classic Australian diction is rugged and make-do. It is straightforward and direct. There are no flights of fancy, no rhetorical flourishes, no embellishments. It is pure function. Never the less, it is rich in its starkness, refined in its purity and delinquent in larrikin expressiveness. I would say it is a very masculine way of speaking except that rural and working class women speak like this too. Hearing it can be refreshing and bracing, like a rain shower after sweltering heat.

This way of dealing with the world served Sherborne well when he wrote the acclaimed 2005 memoir Hoi Polloi, and it helps to give his second collection of poems welcome immediacy and accessibility. Moreover, his javelin-like diction creates the impression that the poet's every utterance and experience belongs to the reader; we are intertwined for better or worse. Reading him, you can't help but make his pain and anguish, his flashing anger and disappointments, his heartache and his coruscating observations on the human animal your own.

Take this poem, for example, of a journalist waiting for a story to break: ‘Three hours to find tomorrow's story./It's always tomorrow, at least in here./The murder has not yet approached the murdered,/but space is reserved where my words/will gather. My by-line already signs it.' The essence of this poem is its clarity and the driving narrative strength. There are no too-clever somersaults here and no obfuscation.

In these 43 poems, Sherborne offers a glimpse into his own life and experience. They are familiar themes if you have read his memoir: horseracing, sexual initiation, journalism, love, infidelity, his parents, and his relationship to the unique Australian landscape. To my mind the last two give him the opportunity to truly show his mettle, melding tenderness and compassion with an almost mystical apprehension of soil:

Whether in winter you stare
at the rockface sky
or in summer you stand
on the plain's blue summit,
around you horizons will flow across
and melt as steady as currents
of a shore and ocean.
And like and ocean
it can take you out too far
till the air's long height
fills your lungs with insects,
and salt cracks like ice
in a lake of land
or heaps itself with the sand-waves.

This is from a poem called ‘The Plain'. It is nature as sacred cathedral and it opens a dialogue with a disquieting landscape that is for some a living organism to be worshipped and for others a vast and impenetrable expanse to avoid. Sherborne is obviously of the former category as poems like ‘Harvest Ritual of the Seven Houses' and ‘The Wishing Stone' attest. In these poems you will find the landscape and its diverse characters freshly evoked with an especial haunted melody that can only be detected by a refined ear capable of eliciting this from the harsh Australian landscape: ‘…and the road's leaves/spin as one lasso like the wind's/unbroken dancing string,/and we carry the bound wheat like a crucifixion/past our homes along this road which points/to itself like an entrance to stars, their cloudy,/empty city.'

Sherborne is equally capable of being very much of the moment, vital and entangled in everyday concerns. In some of his strongest poems he records a failed relationship, falling in love at middle age and feeling like a reckless and shy boy, and contemplating infidelity with one woman even as another sleeps beside him, cut off and isolated, each one drifting away on an ice floe. Perhaps the most affecting poems come from Sherbone's relationship with his parents and his father's passing. They are works that show an awareness of life's brevity and the attendant poignancy this brings to our every breath we take, a transcendent liveliness that makes us perceive the changeless and eternal. I will leave you with this from ‘My Father's Map':

My father's grey skin has come a long journey
which ends in my hands as a cold scroll of fingers.
The ink of his veins are faintest blue.
A map of where I come from
and where I will go to.