As a chronicle of events, however, Nightmarkets is of some interest. The author's [Alan Wearne] urge to mythologise his friends should not be allowed to put the reader off. After all, Les Murray, in a surprising number of his excellent poems, mythologises such crepescular acquaintances as Bob Ellis, who looms in Murray's work as if he, Ellis, were Marlowe to Murray's Shakespeare. Avowedly pursuing failure with the same determination other men expend on the trail of success, not even Ellis, whose flakily confessional memoirs, Letters to the Future , have recently been published in Australia, is quite capable of being entirely uninteresting when recalling the salad days of the poets of his generation. Clive James, "The Australian Poetic Republic", The Times Literary Supplement , 27 November — 3 December, 1987
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