\s mYevtew ELECTRONIC ADDITION - University of British Columbia

OPINIONS AND NOTESconvention, Grace Perry helped transformmodern Australian poetry, freeing it from itsconservative diction and giving it space toswing its idioms in. It's been a commitmentfor Perry as a woman of science as well as apoet of passion: "Can you feel it?" has alwaysbeen coupled with "Does it make any sense?"Sometimes she turned an issue of the journalover to a whole book, a single writer — mostrecently in No. 99 (John Millett's splendidCome down Cunderdang, a broken poeticsequence in which the world of the countryracetrack becomes the arena for cultural history),and No. 97 (A Face in Your Hands, abook of lyrics by Craig Powell, long a residentof Canada). Issue No. 100 is a miscellany oftributes and poems, a small cross-section ofcontemporary Australian verse, from patriarchA. D. Hope to the established, the unknown,and the young. We wish the journal morecontributors, more subscribers, and a long life.THERE ARE LITERARY MYTHS of many kinds.One is that, if you are an able and visiblewriter like Roald Dahl, you will necessarily bea good anthologist: unhappily Roald Dahl'sBook of Ghost Stories (Cape, $17.95) ls boring.It's a collection of coincidence-stories,with no ghosts of consequence and no chills ofexpectation. There is more chill, in fact, in thefantastic realities of Ninotchka Rosca's TheMonsoon Collection (Univ. Queensland,$16.50); in nine linked stories, Rosca — aPhilippine writer now "travelling" — writessometimes awkwardly of bizarre changes inpeople's daily routines (a monsoon causes aworm invasion, a postal clerk becomes abomber), but she is clipped and effective inher intervening vignettes of political rebellionand political repression.Politics is another source of myths. TheOxford Illustrated History of Britain, ed.K. O. Morgan ($29.95), indicates how someof them develop. The book (only adequatelyillustrated, with various prints — of Romantiles, Beatles posters) is a collection of tenseparately-authored chronological chapters.What emerges is a two-tiered story: a myth ofevolution and benevolent Empire (in which,incidentally, scarce mention is given to Canadaeither as a possession or as a political construction),and a chronicle of religion andlaw, which is shown really to be a chronicleof occupation and ownership, mainly of land.Yet the importance of the conflict betweenthese two is never addressed. V. S. Pritchett'sThe Oxford Book of Short Stories ($31.50),a decent but slightly lopsided collection, claimsto include writings from the Commonwealthas well as from England and America, andmoreover, to include those stories that contributeto "the art" rather than depict "thenative scene." But the editorial judgement iscompromised by a taste apparently shaped before1940: "modern" Commonwealth writersturn out to be a Callaghan and Narayan, andare present (quite respectably, but misleadingly)in the company of Saki and WilliamTrevor. A reference book like CommonwealthLiterature (Gage, $13.50) —-a biobibliocriticalguide to some 132 writers — shows howthe Eurocentric bias unconsciously extends tocommentary as well. The book is disappointinglyout-of-date in entries (Robert Service isin, Munro and Gallant are out; there is noGee, no Rushdie) but it is even more so inattitude: the aim is corrective and centralist— to show "how many writers there are outthere." Modern writers, meanwhile, are shapingcentres and perspectives of their own.American-centred works run their own risks.Twayne's The American Short Story 1945-1980 A Critical History, ed. Gordon Weaver,is a fragmentary tripartite attempt to namenames and encapsulate literary quality, butcan succeed in little more. There is a kind ofdesperation about its lists and its speed, buteven that serves a purpose. The book led me(happily) to the work of Russell Banks andthe recent stories of Paul Bowles, and thoughmany other leads proved barren, that does notnullify its function. The bibliography, however,has special quirks. It omits Clark Blaiseand Jane Rule under its list of AmericanStory-writers of the period (Fine, you say) ;but it does list Leon Rooke, Mavis Gallant,and Alice Munro — the last of these (bibliographersbe warned) for a book called TheBeggar Mind. Joseph and Johanna Jones'well-intentioned books Australian Fiction andNew Zealand Fiction (both from Twayne)also suffer from the survey impulse: fasteningon descriptive themes, they organize the fictionaccordingly and leave out too much detail.Similar constraints affect other Twaynebooks —• Dorothy Blair's Senegalese Literature(a serious treatment of a limited body ofwork), Catherine B. Stevenson's VictorianWomen Travel Writers in Africa (from MaryKingsley to Lady Barker: Stevenson's commentsrange from notes to extended analyses,in an uneven attempt to solve by relative allocationsof space the problem of significancethat surveys create), John Weigel's PatrickWhite (simply a reader's guide to plot struc-2O6