The Literate Detective & Other Crimes by Paul Scully, Bonfire Books 2025, was launched by Peter Boyle at Gleebooks on 26 April 2025

I knew very little of Paul Scully’s poetry when I agreed to launch The Literate Detective. It was therefore with some degree of trepidation that I turned to the book. What would I find? Would it be all about crime fiction, murders and police work? I’ve never really been an avid reader of crime novels but, having now read The Literate Detective with much delight, I want to suggest that its true focus, the chief character or prime suspect, is neither crime nor detectives but language itself. What stands out for me in The Literate Detective is its sustained celebration of what it is to inhabit language, to become larger through breathing in this added dimension language gives us.

Let me start with a few examples. Consider these lines from ‘Mind Stunts’:

Impeded light, an air-pocket
in the room’s high corner, a sudden breeze
across my unshaven chin, an echo
ghosts every sound, my mind rakes
recent encounters for peripheral eyes
or gestures that might have accosted
my self-absorption, the page before me
poised for a pointless third perusal,
the unborn rustle at my shoulder craves a name.

The opening lines with their upward inflected sounds capture so perfectly the sense of starting out. We could be about to embark on a sea voyage, a trip to a new world, or an expansive welcoming of the day. Then comes a shift of mood. With “peripheral eyes” something darker enters the picture. And finally the strange image in the closing line “the unborn rustle at my shoulder craves a name”. We at once enter what could be one of Dante’s circles of Hell with a ghost at our shoulder.

Immediately below the next poem ‘Premonition’, with its startling image of traffic congestion, modulates between the enlarged world of the poetic imagination and the more humdrum rhythm of everyday realities:

The road slick with evening’s retreat,
the usual traffic glacier, a level crossing
sign hovers above the verge on the climb
to the traffic lights on Malvern Avenue.

Style and tone of voice are at the core of Paul’s achievement in this book. Attunement to the sound dimension of language is one element in this, the ability to craft unexpected images is another. Often Paul Scully’s images come barbed with a summons to think differently about everyday reality. I love the opening lines of ‘Mirage’:

Distance on the bitumen is rectangles
of shifting sameness . . .

Suddenly “sameness” is itself transformed, becoming an illusion. Once illuminated in this way, can sameness ever be the same again?

 The opening sequence of poems dealing with detectives and crime is marked by humour and an often slightly off-kilter way of seeing. ‘The Crowded Streets’  gives us this slightly Prufrockian vision of people at day’s end:

The moon-sun shift-change tugs
at the ragged ends of fitful sleep and meals taken
in reverse, and people taste more bitter
even in their customary dosage.
They are a cocktail, served still, stirred or shaken,
but mostly tend their lives in gentle anonymity . .

I love that phrase “gentle anonymity”. It captures so much in two words, and there’s the unexpected humour of the way the people themselves are cocktails. The narrator can only drink them “in their customary dosage”. Among the many delightfully humorous images is this one from ‘Wink’:

“nor do I rattle
like an encyclopaedia after a purgative”

Humour and detectives are only a part of this fine collection. Equally prominent are celebrations of the natural world, as well as autobiographical and ekphrastic poems. ‘A City of Bats’ and ‘Stratocumuli’ beautifully evoke the worlds they describe:

Masses of pillow-soft cloud, a Pangaea,
Gondwanaland,
supercontinents aloft against a cobalt-tinting-steel
backdrop, a forever-scape that lures the freed mind
into luscious delusion.

The poem sequence ‘Resilience’ is especially striking with its portrait of a sixties or seventies Catholic mum cramming her seven children into the Holden for a shopping trip. I grew up myself in a family of eight and this poem really resonated with me. I was struck too by the portrayal in this poem of the disabled young man who has to will his limbs to move, an effort that “tore pausing breaths from his marrow”. Paul comments: “faith wears livery, mercy is ecumenical — Mum would have mouthed a rough-cast rosary along with him.” “Ecumenical mercy” could be a description of my own mother. I remember how, even when someone behaved badly, committed some really unforgivable offense, my mother would say “He’s not a well man”. This poem captures so beautifully the benign grace of a particular style of Catholicism at its best.

Before I close there are two wonderful poems I must mention — the one a reflection on a Frida Kahlo exhibition at the Sydney Festival; the other a poem near the end of the book ‘Any Way the Wind Blows’. In ‘Bandaged Beauty: Frida Kahlo Exhibition, Sydney Festival, January 2023’, Paul Scully brings the viewer and the location of the exhibition into dialogue with Frida Kahlo’s paintings. He is able to capture both the specifically Mexican character of Kahlo’s work and its intersection with an Australian audience. The landscape at Barangaroo is seen as at one with the torn and fractured world of Kahlo’s paintings. “We discover/ on our exit the excavation scars on the rockface carry/ a seer’s imprint”. We enter “the beauty/ of fracture, where pain cleaves truer than blood or breath”. It is a wounded landscape we as colonisers inhabit, “always reflexive, always resplendent, / even when darksome, a humming-bird, fragile, fierce.”

‘Any Way the Wind Blows’  is a masterful poem. Inventive, charged with surprising images, beautifully modulated, fully alive as poetry. If it’s ok I thought I would read the whole of this poem to finish. I thought it was such a marvellous evocation of something that surrounds us most of our lives, something we rarely talk about, the wind.

Any Way the Wind Blows
……….After a stanza in “One Day’s Poem” by Don Paterson

Fates are sown within it, or so the song goes,
its sea-laden form cools a cloying afternoon, we expose
our “intimate apparel” to it on good drying days, diasporas
find the four corners under its impulse, the illest variant
scorches goodness. Only the broadest wingspan bird knows,
the wandering albatross mightiest among them,
a home in its ephemera; for us
there is no harbour there, much as the carefree suppose
they’ll find an anchorage. We cannot see it, only
its impact, and how it trembles the weather map’s isobars.
Yet logic flees itself and the dream inveigles,
grows wanton even, like the very wind. We style
ourselves storm-tossed invertebrates time and again.
We call on our inner Houdinis, no doubt, to cast off
the manacles of the ordinary, to revel when we would else-while
ferment–existence has mass and the everyday
the tint of predestination.
But I wonder whether the self as leaf, the miles
a fragment must travel to embrace the whole
of nature’s variegation is the root chord of our refrain.

This truly is a marvellous book and I urge everyone to buy a copy.

 – Peter Boyle

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Peter Boyle is a Sydney-based poet and translator of poetry from Spanish. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Companions, Ancestors, Inscriptions (Vagabond Press, 2024). He has published nine books as a translator of poetry from Spanish. His poetry collections have won numerous awards, including the New South Wales Premier’s, the Adelaide Festival Award and the Queensland Premier’s Poetry Award.  After teaching for many years with TAFE NSW, Peter completed a doctorate in Creative Arts from the University of Western Sydney.

The Literate Detective & Other Crimes by Paul Scully, is available from https://bonfirebooks.org/ product/ pre-order-the-literate-detective-other-crimes-by-paul-scully/
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