Susan Hampton

Three lines from The Seventh section of Finola Moorhead’s A Handwritten Modern Classic, first published in 1977 and re-issued March 2013 by Spinifex Press, close out a varied discussion by the author on the political nature of death, that Socrates’ death ‘was political’ (as underlined in the handwritten original), that Socrates was not a writer and that writers ‘need teachers like Socrates’. In the same section she argues that artists often use ‘Another’s pain … for the success of expression’. ‘Art as comfort’, Moorhead follows on, ‘ — strange concept. / Such assumptions aren’t questioned often enough.’