BryshaWilson Press - The Maze of the Muse
Hitch-hiking young tourists assailed by a ‘truly woeful Eagles tape’ and
trapped in an ancient Merc carrying an impressive haul of hash and coke
across the border of France and Spain, does not sound like the stuff of
a literary adventure undertaken to meet a highly-regarded poet and man
of letters. However, it sure smacks of the 1970s and as such, it deftly
evokes the era in which young Australian poet Jack Driscoll sets out on
an odyssey to Deya, Mallorca to meet literary titan Robert Graves and
obtain a poet’s blessing from him. The unfolding surprise of the
unexpected is one of the most striking qualities of Larry Buttrose’s
novel The Muse of the Maze (BryshaWilson Press, Melbourne, 2016, eBook).
The other is the delicately modulated prose delivered as a first person
narrative by Jack, who assumes the dual role of major player and
observer as his story unfolds.
On Poets and Dancers as Heroes
The
first blog written for the BryshaWilson Press launch was about a love
of books but on reflection more burning topics presented themselves. The
chief of these is the question of why you would spend the best part of a
year setting up a book-publishing venture when the market place is
buried in mountains of books being churned out by vast numbers of
publishers all aggressively competing for every cent of the book-buying
buck to be scrounged from the big wide world of readers.