[If] you are committed to literature and have written poems, which are shorter and do not require the persistent physical effort—among other efforts—that a novel does, then it may seem that a novel is next in the natural order of things. But a saving sophistication makes you wary of the thinly veiled autobiography. A decent camouflage of interests and themes is advisable. Instead of yourself, an acquaintance may serve as a focus. And if he is in the novel, then you yourself are naturally, even...

"How close to where I live lie the ultimate ends of the earth," Ovid wrote from Tomis, the semisavage Black Sea village to which he had been exiled by Augustus in A.D. 8. History is silent about the reason for the sudden banishment from Rome of its wittiest, gayest poet, last of the generation that included Virgil, Horace and Propertius. Ovid himself thought he was being punished for his writing. "My only fault is that I possess both talent and taste," he claimed in the "T...

The coupling of two so different novellas as ["Child's Play" and "The Bread of Time to Come"] seems peculiar at first: one concerns a young Australian's experiences just before and during the First World War; the other is an intensely inward first-person narration by a contemporary Italian terrorist. David Malouf, however, is a richly imagistic writer, philosophical and literary in the best sense; his terrorist is hardly the subject of a slick thriller. Though proba...

Surreally hard-edged, the world [the short novel, Child's Play, and the short stories, "Eustace" and "The Prowler," project] is one where details have a hallucinatory vividness and patterns stand out with stark clarity: only significance remains creepily opaque. Like the dreams that regularly perturb their characters, the short novel and two stories gathered here are intensely enigmatic. Though geographically a world apart—Italy is the background to the novel, Austr...

David Malouf is a … mature poet, and … [an] accessible one; his long looping sentences twining over their line-endings need to be followed carefully, but he is no exhibitionist: the techniques he has learnt are subordinated to the poems themselves. He has a strong visual consciousness with a sense of joyful absorption in the natural world which makes the overworked word "celebration" irresistible. The first poem in [First Things Last] is about lemon trees gone wild, and the secon...

Many of the poems in First Things Last … seem overwrought, as if Malouf were struggling to find forms in which to embody his lyricism. There is often a laboured quality to the rhetoric. 'Reading a View' is typical in this respect…. Most of the First Things Last poems deal with only those aspects of human life that reflect the natural world. A constant stream of intricate metaphor runs through this poetry, with an occasional triumph of the literal. This juxtaposition of the abstra...