The Adoption Order, by Ian McBryde; Five Islands Press, 2009, 69 pages, $19.95.

I was eager to read Ian McBryde’s newest book, The Adoption Order, because I liked his previous book, Slivers (Flat Chat Press, 2005), so very much. Slivers is one of the few books that I re-read to check if the magic is still potent. And so far, so good. The heroic voice of the poet leads me through a Blade Runner landscape, smoky visions of epic sorrows and ironies: ‘‘I was able to save everyone except you. And me.”

Unfinished Business (published in Australia as Autobiography), by Tadhg Kennelly, with Scott Gullan; Mercier Press, 2009, 353 pages, 16.99 euros (in Australia: Hardie Grant, $35).

Tadhg Kennelly is the first man to have won an AFL Premiership Medal and an All Ireland Senior Gaelic Football Medal. He comes from the literary town of Listowel in the Gaelic-football-mad county of Kerry in the south-west of Ireland. In his book, which he has written with Scott Gullan of the Melbourne Herald­ Sun, he describes the Kerry team as “the Manchester United of Gaelic football”. Indeed, Irish sports commentator Eamon Dunphy has said in praise of Kerry that there is something right about the world when Kerry win the All Ireland and Brazil win the World Cup.

Handling Edna: The Unauthorised Biography, by Barry Humphries; Hachette, 2009, 387 pages, $49.99.

Surely Australia’s greatest, certainly most monstrous, comic creation, Dame Edna Everage has been inspiring and challenging, entertaining and insulting the public for more than half a century. Such is the Dame’s pull on reality that when her memoirs, My Gorgeous Life, were published in the UK they appeared on the non-fiction best-seller list. It was surprising then to find that, when recently approached for an obituary of her on file (all famous women have them in wait; the Queen Mother’s was being updated for sixty years) the Times demurred, suggesting instead that the Features pages were a more suitable spot.

The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, edited by Peter Pierce; Cambridge University Press, 2009, 622 pages, $140.

Cyril Hopkins’ Marcus Clarke,  edited by Laurie Hergenhan, Ken Stewart and Michael Wilding; Australian Scholarly Publishing in association with the State Library of Victoria, 2009, 339 pages, $39.95.

These two books on Australian literature appear at a time when the teaching of the subject at universities has reached crisis point. There are now only two professors of Australian Literature, compared with eighteen in Creative Writing, and numerous others in Cultural and Media Studies. The latter fashionable areas have swallowed up the former.

God and Man According to Tolstoy, by Alexander Boot; Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 215 pages, £50.

Great wits are sure to madness near allied,

And thin partitions do their bounds divide.

—Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel

Genius and mediocrity frequently coincide in the same person. Alex Boot takes Leo (Lev) Tolstoy as a very striking case in point. Tolstoy was probably the greatest novelist of all time. Most of his readers in English have probably not gone beyond War and Peace and Anna Karenina, although his last major novel, Resurrection, sold more copies than the two acclaimed “great” novels put together. Perhaps surprisingly, most of Tolstoy’s writing, especially once he had passed fifty, was not only non-fiction but, according to Boot, spectacularly bad non-fiction, portentous work affecting to attend to humanity’s spiritual, moral and political needs and pronouncing loudly on everything.

Deep Down Things: Collected Poems, by Amy Brooke; Medlar Press (Nelson, New Zealand), 2008, 206 pages, NZ$24.95.

Visiting Christchurch in New Zealand recently, I was shown over Rutherford’s rooms in the old university and mentioned Douglas Stewart’s great poem “Rutherford” to my hosts. None had heard of Stewart, who left New Zealand to pursue a literary career in Australia in 1938 at the age of twenty-five but who continued to write often on New Zealand. Indeed I mentioned Stewart to several well-educated people in New Zealand—poets even—and drew a blank almost every time. It struck me as sad that two such culturally close countries should not share the best of their poetic and other cultural heritages.