Vincent O’Sullivan
What Fire by Alice Miller (Liverpool University Press, 2021), 52pp, $37; Unseasoned Campaigner by Janet Newman (Otago University Press, 2021), 104pp, $27.50
What fire, indeed? This attractively printed collection with its fifty pages of poetry is prefaced with a quote from Volumnia, the honour-at-all-cost matron in Coriolanus:
I am hush’d until our city be a-fire,
And then I’ll speak a little.
There is also a poem called ‘Volumnia’, with its lines:
We had no use for history but Volumnia’s.
That woman against fire.