The aim of this workbook is to facilitate and help survivors of traumatic experiences and torture though writing them, under the guidance of planned questions as methodological tools (clinical perspective). The overall goal is to create a domain where communities that have experienced trauma can find their identity and self and interconnect with each other.

First of all, the discussion between Bennett and Maiden raises a variety of potential questions around trauma as embodied experience (trauma’s outskirts) – the emotions or the senses that were the result of traumatic experience. Maiden addresses the important role of emotions, sensations and events on trauma's outskirts by asking about the survivors’ situation in a place, their feelings and how they can be helped to thrive.

The start of writing this useful workbook was dated back to South American women torture survivors, two decades ago. The questions were asked to them as a specific group of people. This group described their experiences (dates, geographical and historical moments, etc.) and they were free to write and confess to anything around their traumatic experiences. This workbook aimed to free these women from their inner worries, anxieties and fears, and gave them back their voices that had been kept captive for many years. In addition, the workbook ameliorated their expression, stylistic way of writing and their way to express their views and opinions openly. So, their writing skills and critical spirit were enforced and this oriented them in another liberating way apart from just writing their traumatic experiences as static moments or timelines of their lives.

Furthermore, logos (narration) of their traumatic experiences in the context of the past allowed them to distance these experiences in future. The play between the different time zones (past, present and future) can reveal an unusual and different character of their perspectives through their therapeutic orientation. The questions of the workbook are appealing today as each one of us can answer them as a vivid, representative of the way experience itself questions. Traumatic experiences can decode our inner world and create a field of questioning other experiences or memories of the past.

The workbook’s discussion is written in a spiritual and vivid manner, full of details and experiences. Thus, each reader can read the book at once to find the inner character of traumatic experience as embodied. The authors proposed a therapeutic way to recover all these traumas of the South American women and they analysed carefully and in details their behaviour in a traumatic situation and after it. A traumatised person embodies her or his trauma and expresses it through her or his ways of thinking, senses or even behaviour. Trauma is a state of loss, wound or even gap not only somatically but in a more mental state. The questionnaire of this workbook is descriptive and searches in details the inner world of each one that will fill it. The main core is to explore more in the trauma’s world and deepen our knowledge around the topic.

According to the authors the writing is a form both of practice and revealing-concealing of our thoughts at the same time. The discussion between the authors has autobiographical elements or an apparent link between the author and the readers. The writing was difficult for some members of the community, as some participants found it personally revealing or troubling. This workbook has a distinct character of forming and exercising creativity via different encounters with frames which might either represent the writer’s or learner’s subjectivity or not. We dive into the unknowing parts of our writer self and writing patterns.

In reviewing empirical research on creative writing of traumatic experiences, we can distinguish some approaches like the conception and practice of creative writing of trauma as methodological tool and the qualitative date that were exposed and conducted about participants’ experiences in practice. This workbook is an empirical novel addition in the current research in relation to creative writing on trauma. The authors would like to heal or recover participants’ souls through the writing, expression and critical view. As the participants searched and analysed their traumas, they understood their experiences and became more familiar with them, enabling them to face them radically. The radical character of authors’ research is obvious by their organisation and decision to help the participants face to face with their own traumas or tortures.

In conclusion, the purpose of this book is a double manifestation: to free from inner traumas in general and to form an individual narration about them in practice. The workbook offers new data over the disciplines of traumatic experiences and their practical recovery.

This collection is most definitely a book of two parts. Empirical comprises poems written at the prospect of a motorway being built through Melbourne’s Royal Park. ‘Crystal Palace’ assembles itself and spins above that same park, incorporating visions vastly different from the grasses and council rubble that (almost) became a motorway. Not only the content but the sense of motion in the two parts work together.

We look at the landscape: From the playing field, stone steps climb into these acres of rubble where between the train line and the gully tyre tracks lead away in among head-high grass­­ Here where I vanish into my life again the way a photographer walks off into her photographs—a vault of light in which every thing appears—the smell of fennel, even, rising where I step over the railway line ...

('Empirical I' 5)

The first seven poems play across this landscape – grey-green, scented, and full of light ­­­–  a field of sense impressions, described and redescribed as memory unfolds '... this / grey light before rain in which years I have forgotten / invent a landscape still in what I have named / landscape ... '. ('Empirical V' 11)

The world is linear until the last poem in this section, ‘Royal Park’, where we make a ninety-degree turn downwards and begin to excavate the history of the park. Near the surface come the finding and naming of Moonee Ponds and the efforts of the various acclimatisation societies. Other uses are the Zoo, the Quarantine station, a model farm, the Centennial Exhibition, down and down to the fossil record, where even the past proves to have a past.

‘Royal Park’ ends as a ' ... military infantry camp ...  / waiting for 6000 or 7000 men who are to enter into it this week / from every part of Australasia ... ' (25) and a medley of two world wars:

Now bullet casings, bottle shards, steel mesh alike

turn to monument under my eye and by this trick

here I have felt the past around me like a landscape ...

(28)

In ‘Royal Park’ Gorton uses a technique characteristic of all seven poems in the second part, ‘Crystal Palace’. Quotes and the poet’s own words carry the story along, not quite found poems but close to it. At first she uses notes from the Melbourne historical record; the second part lifts us off the flat park into a spinning landscape of fantasy and visions based on Coleridge (especially ‘Kubla Khan’), Rimbaud’s Villes poems from his ‘Illuminations’, and others. We are linked with the 19^th century explorers of the human imagination, some with and some without drugs. (The general effect was rather like reading ‘The Waste Land’ for the first time – part recognising familiar voices and part feeling abject gratitude for the notes.)

Fragmentation and light figure large in both groups of poems, and they are approached in a fascinating variety of ways. ‘Aphrodite of Melos’ (31–35) – the Venus de Milo – was only broken as she came back into the light:

They broke her arms off when they dragged her out — In her left hand she held a mirror— They smashed her earlobes to get the earrings off — ... the statue looks into its other side in which there is not one thing more real than another—rank after rank of light between the mirror and its eyes

(34–35)

And later, channelling Rimbaud:

A place as elegant as a boulevard—its air is made of light— A hundred gentle souls comprise its picture of the masses— Here, too, the houses come to a stop—Its city opens directly into a landscape—that idea of the natural, extending woodlands and vast fields—a perpetual backdrop where pitiless aristocrats hunt down their histories through its invented light—

(‘Cities I, Imperial Panoramas’ 37)

where 'an empire’s names—its Lebanons, its Alleghenies—remake themselves in light' (‘Cities II’ 38).

The Crystal Palace itself illustrates both themes: the physical building was made up of fragments of glass, and designed to display all the bits and pieces of Empire, 'a hoard of wreckage closed in glass'. It is described in detail ranging from engineering considerations of awesome purpose to housekeeping details equally crucial: 'Mr Paxton sets the floorboards a half-inch apart so the women’s skirts will sweep the floor clean—' (42). (I really hope this is true.) And in between, coal from Newcastle, ostrich feathers, a revolving-turret rifle, and mechanical hummingbirds.

‘Kubla Khan’ is famously a work of interrupted imagination, a fragment itself, and is in this collection the context for ‘Mirror, Palace’ (46–48) and ‘Life Writing’ (49–71). Each deals with the poem’s composition, the first with the immediate story, the accepted legend about the writing of ‘Kubla Khan’ (complete with the lonely farmhouse and the person from Porlock).

The second, ‘Life Writing’, postulates a lifetime’s worth of experience, people, words, impressions, coming together into what you might think of as a first draft, perhaps of ‘Kubla Khan’, perhaps just of a life.

He said, ‘I wrote Kubla Khan at Brimstone Farm’—

Three hours the author rested in his chair—

Three nights the author suffered through the Pains of Sleep—

After three days’ journey, they came to a city— ...

For three years, the Traveller journeyed north and east— ...

Three days they rested, before they

ventured into that desert where at night a traveller, alone,

hears spirits talking ...

(68–70)

Or is every experience spinning in a context of its own, subject to perpetual change as long as it is able to live in the imagination?

The collection ends with ‘Landscape with Magic Lantern Slides’ (72–74) – among other things, a reminder that even magic lanterns have their own way of dealing with fragments and light:

This stillness before rain—a field, its broken statues overrun with grass— ...

at once

resembling and drawn into that flat and through-shine plain at the back of all description in which each word lives in its own landscape— ...

(72)

This book can be read from a variety of angles – not just about light or fragments, but also with respect to how we see the landscape(s) around us via our individual sense experiences as well as via those of our society and its history – experiences we are predisposed to have. It’s a pleasure on many levels and is a stimulating, rewarding read.

The Intimacy of Strangers is the second anthology of the North Shore Poetry Project (NSPP established 2012) a group convened by Philip Porter which meets regularly for workshops, readings, dinners and performance of their poetry. Over the years as skills and confidence develop, a group such as this needs to make a permanent record of their achievement. What better way than an anthology? Their previous anthology A Patch of Sun (2014) is a vibrant testament to earlier achievements.

This new book covers the period of 2015 to 2018 and brings together poems of 33 poets, 25 of whom are members of the group and 8 are significant local and international poets who have read at NSPP dinners held at The Incinerator restaurant in Willoughby, North Sydney. It’s not hard to imagine senses heightened with the pleasure of delicious food, the tastes, aromas, sounds of crockery and clinking of glasses, the talking and laughter, tuned to absorb and relish poems shared in this venue. We don’t know how many poems are read for the first time but we do know that each reading came about through the individual poet deciding to take the leap and share the intimacy of their solitary endeavours with an audience all of whom in the true sense are strangers. In bringing them all together The Intimacy of Strangers  allows the reader into the meetings, not quite the same as being there but somewhat like gazing into The Lacquer Room 1936, the image of a Grace Cossington painting which graces the front cover, to absorb the colours, rhythms, sounds, tone and sheer artistry.

The anthology is structured in 8 chapters of poems each starting with a copy of the menu, and excerpts from the guest poet(s) members who read on the night a  feature which offers the option of reading poet by poet or chapter by chapter.

The highlight of the book is the range and diversity of poets. Almost always their most urgent preoccupation is with the ordinary everyday matters of living that affect all and each of us at some time and about which they write about and share their intimate experience. David Malouf finds daily enlightenment and forgiveness in a new loaf of bread. For Sarnie Hay it’s the seduction of whisky on ice in a crystal glass; for Helen Bersten lying in bed it’s the joy of new rain mixed with the irritation of wet washing; Tricia Dearborn with wicked wit explores elements of chemistry, perimenopause and sex. For her the onset of menopause is like sitting in a live rocket about to take off.

For others such as John Upton (1939-2017) to whom the book is dedicated it is his experience of a particularly personal turning point in his life:

'Survivor' You’re sitting in a mirror in a wardrobe door on the end of a double bed mirror and bed both empty

(8)

John Carey writes of his daily confrontation with the advance of macular degeneration:

'Blue' I stare into a sky of ever-reaching blue Deep as my prior notion about it, furred sepia Round the edges from traces of fires or the slow creep of macular degeneration

(243)

Each poet contributes 1-6 poems. Anna Kerdijk Nicholson contributes five complete poems and one intriguing excerpt from a longer work: 'The world is a handkerchief, today I spread it across my knees' from her book: Possession: Poems about the voyage of Lt James Cook in the Endeavour:

1 I navigate the days in this place with the light of the sun and sometimes stars, but my movements are not to-the-degree, and once commenced, my track does not engage or lose the Great Southern Land, neither am I under orders nor have 94 in my care.

(217)

Whether you choose to read chapter by chapter or by individual poet it is not a book to consume in one sitting, rather it’s one that invites you to return again and again to savour its many intimacies or to catch that one poem you missed the first time around. With each reading it’s a feast of skills whether with strict form, sharp rhyme, free verse or the hypnotic, imagist experimentation in Rosemary Huisman’s

'it is as if' in dreams    we return to the sea down to the shore   devolving at the shore’s edge  moving into the warm white flow and ebb   receding

(13) 

This second anthology from NSPP brings fresh examples of how this community of dedicated poets see and hear the world whether funny, mystifying, magical, sweet, or deeply moving to share with everyone. The seasoned hands of editors Kissane and Porter ensure the overall perfect mix, a stimulating menu for every reader and a formidable challenge for any group planning a similar endeavour.

I live right in the middle of Wollongong, in an old weatherboard house surrounded by trees. On a quiet day you can hear the ‘bupbupbupbupbup’ of the pedestrian crossing on the main street. You can also hear wattlebirds calling and cockatoos cracking nuts and the construction site three doors up and traffic, and passers-by, and now and then I can hear frogs – frogs! – and our next door neighbours’ band practicing for a gig (they’re very good, and never play later than ten. They’re called Los Pintar, if you want to check them out). ‘Soundscape’ is the word R. Murray Schafer used to describe an environment or ecology of sound in his book The Tuning of the World, published back in 1977. Here’s another useful word, ‘periautography’. It means writing about or around the self. This is a handy word to have when reviewing Amplifications, because the book is a series of chapters that discuss Carter’s own life events, including death and bereavement, sexual love, being a child, being a parent, migration, work, all that – although the book is not about these events. The book is about sound. And one way for a person to approach a subject so big is by chipping off little, periautographical bits. Carter uses a punning neologism, periotography, a ‘writing around the ears’ to describe his Amplifications.

As a young man, Paul Carter migrated from Great Britain to Australia. He has worked into this experience, distance and separation being one subject he returns to, and aural and cultural dislocation in a new country another. What makes Carter’s work on migration powerful is that he begins with sound – the sounds of landscape or country, and the sound of language. Carter is especially interested in the resonances between the sounds of ‘nature’, like birdsong and the sounds of ‘culture’, speech and music. There are things about Carter’s work that I wish were different. As an anglophone and British migrant, he was also intensely interested in colonialism. Reading back through his writing on colonialism now, I think his work on this topic includes too much wishful thinking, a desire to uncover colonial encounters that tend to redeem or exonerate individuals and processes involved in colonisation, to look for the exceptional moments of exchange rather than the relentless pattern of destruction and exploitation.

Amplifications lets the reader know what it’s like to listen consciously. If you’ve ever recorded sound you will notice the difference between what shows up on the recording and what you experience with the naked ear. A microphone picks up some frequencies better than others, and a microphone doesn’t have a brain. If we can hear, we are processing sound all the time, consciously or unconsciously. Imagine a playgroup: parents sit drinking tea and chatting while the babies feed and cry and the toddlers and pre-schoolers play. There’s lots of sound – teaspoons in cups, sobbing, burbling, the crash of blocks, kid conversation, the occasional high-pitched scream from a two-year-old. The parents tune out all that and tune in to the adult conversation. Another adult comes into the room – let’s say she’s there to check and tag the kettle and the microwave. To her, the sound in the room is unbearable noise, a cacophony, how can anyone hold a conversation with all that noise going on? Then suddenly, one parent leaps up and rushes over to a child to help or comfort them. Not completely tuned out, then. These parents can discern a cry of distress from their children even while they are apparently attentive only to the conversation of the other adults. Our beautiful brains, always processing the signals that arrive via our ears, whether we think we are paying attention or not.

The best two chapters of Amplifications are at the beginning of the book. One focuses on Carter’s childhood and family of origin in the UK. The other is an account of a time spent back in England, looking after his mother in the last weeks of her life. The interest in these chapters is not that of ‘a story’. The events related are simple enough – paying attention to birds, tracing the influence of his parents’ taste in reading, recorded ‘letters’ sent from a father to his adult child on the other side of the world, digging in the garden, conversation and its absence, listening to the sounds of another person in the house. What makes these chapters good reading is Carter’s experience of events through sound, and his use of sound, whether it is birdsong, human language or the distressing abject sounds of retching and laboured breath, and his lively mind linking these audible things to ideas, feelings, histories. I’m never waiting to see what will happen next. I’m following an account of thought and experience, all that usually unconscious processing of sound slowed down and considered.

Thanks to the twentieth century phenomena of radio and tape, all kinds of changes in our aural world happened, changes that were once novel but now feel natural. Sound recorded onto tape could be cut up and stuck together. Sound could be broadcast to whole cities, and across continents. Sound could be recorded, manipulated and shared. The aural experiences of speech and music are the most codified and analytically approachable parts of the world of sound. So once we get into that R. Murray Schaefer thing, the soundscape, the terrain becomes a little wilder. A soundscape is something we can experience live – it’s the experience of being in my resonant, leaky wood and tin house and listening to frogs, traffic, shouts from the street and all that, the experience of being at playgroup and tuning in and out of the vocal sounds and the incidental sound of material objects bumping against each other – but since the development of recording and playback technologies, artists can deliberately construct soundscapes, whether for a space or the airwaves. Carter and his colleagues in the field recognise that this kind of work has been the most marginal of audio formats. Carter created many works for radio, and his practice has also been situated in art galleries and in museums. He had a long and close working relationship with the late Martin Harrison, poet and radio producer. The field in which Carter works has been affected by digitisation of audio cultures, a concerted policy of consolidation into conservative radio formats by the ABC in particular, new forms of interpretative and participatory mediation of the museum and gallery experience, and the increasing precarity of artists and the networks and infrastructure that could support a diversity of arts practice over decades, rather than relying on a constant but brief blooming of ‘emerging artist’ energy and optimism and financial juggling. Here’s how he puts it,

… change occurred, scarcely perceptible at first, eventually a landslide: the cultural, institutional and technological settings supporting these sound histories eroded and at length collapsed. (4)

The works created and co-created by Paul Carter that are listed in the back of Amplifications show the importance of the ABC as a commissioner of work and also as a locus for sound culture in Australia. The ABC had the money, the gear, the people and the audience to sustain this fragile field of art making. But funding was reduced, policy shifted and programming changed, with the result that ABC radio formats became more conservative. Carter says that his focus had already shifted.

An optimist, I seized on the evaporation of radio into digital listening platforms as another creative dispersal; my own immersion in public culture had already migrated from radio to public art; I looked forward to revisiting the radiophonic work in the context of a new dramaturgy of public space. (5)

Carter does not make any detailed discussion of ‘digital listening platforms’. My own observation would be that, while sound production is cheaper and more accessible and artists can make their work available online, in sound art, as in other art forms, digitisation has made explicit the power of distribution models in creative practice. We get our music from streaming services, maybe Bandcamp downloads if we’re conscientious consumers, and we get our talk from podcasts, using formats we’re familiar with, interviews, panel shows, documentary. Even documentary audio is often presented in a narrative format – ‘telling stories’ is assumed to be the unarguable purpose of audio culture. Story is hard to define, but easy to endow with vague significance, to treat as a transcendent, essential, or originary. The possibilities of treating sound spatially, cutting, mixing, layering and disrupting, the potential for structures other than ‘story’ to play out in an audio work are not much talked about by people making work for digital platforms.

It took me a long time to read this book and I spent an even longer time thinking about it. It’s not difficult or dull but it’s dense, close-packed. The aurality of Carter’s thinking means he has insights into experience that are fresh to those of us who don’t listen in the same way. These essays look back and there are memoir moments but remembering the self in times past is not this book’s reason for being; it’s not elegiac or nostalgic, but summarising and concluding, the preparation of a vital, perversely optimistic legacy.

Is Australia out of balance, spiritually and environmentally? Are we alienated from the land and ourselves as a result?

Yes, argues Monica Tan in her travel memoir, Stranger Country. Non-Indigenous Australians huddle together in cities, ‘face out to sea because our minds are always someplace else’ (214). Globalisation has swamped local culture in a digital age, and non-Indigenous Australians fear, ‘we are nothing but shitty, distorted photocopies of compatriots in our respective motherlands’ (214).

A second generation Australian, Tan searches for a sense of belonging that includes her Chinese Malay heritage and her Australian birthplace. Tan resists stereotyping of Asian migrants as bananas—‘yellow on the outside, white on the inside’ (189). Yet, like many Australians, she acknowledges knowing little about Indigenous culture, other than the whitewashed history of high school textbooks.

Tan sets out in a Toyota RAV4 to find a way to be Australian that balances Country, history and race, educating herself and her readers along the way. In this sense, Tan’s memoir mirrors Robyn Davidson’s famous exploratory narrative where a lone female narrator encounters the Australian outback as a foreign place, and her internal and external journey is the subject. More than forty years after Tracks was published, Tan also explores physical, personal and ideological versions of space in the outback (Beck).

Throughout her road trip, Tan weaves in history of the White Australia policy, and Anti-Chinese sentiment expressed as ‘yellow peril’. Yet as she travels to Broome, a hybrid outback Australia emerges, beautifully described as a ‘stir-fry mix of countries and cultures’ (121). In the late 1880s, Darwin’s population was largely Chinese or ABC (Australian-Born Chinese), outnumbering Europeans at least four to one. Tan is surprised to learn that their Chinese descendants identify as Australians. Eddy Ah Toy in Pine Creek, is comfortable being a third generation ABC and ‘Territorian of the year’ in 2005, and seems disinterested in his ancestral village.

As she travels further away from cities, Tan discovers that a deep connection to land is possible and that all Australians can learn from Aboriginal culture. Language about the land is lyrical and has a sense of reciprocity: ‘I had left tracks on its sand; it had blown sea salt over my skin’ (174). Tan eschews desolate bauxite mines and land degraded by multinational industries, instead affirming the wisdom of Aboriginal relationships to the natural world as active caretakers. Readers are shown the Aboriginal, cooperative relationship to Country as an alternative to Western extractive mentality that mines and removes the land’s riches.

On Yirritja land, Tan writes of Australian environmentalist Val Plumwood and her wrestle with a crocodile in Kakadu National Park. She describes how this changed Plumwood’s anthropomorphic view of the world, as seeing herself as part of the food chain, rather than as a superior human with the right to exploit the natural world through industry and agriculture (246).

Lurujarri trail takes her deeper into Country and its Dreaming. She goes fishing with a Goolarabooloo family who bring back a turtle to roast on a campfire. While white urban walkers are confronted by the ‘butcher’s mess of gullal organs’ (165), Tan relishes both the experience and turtle meat.

Tan wrestles with colonial Australian attitudes to Aboriginal culture, inextricably linked to the land. Sacred Aboriginal art is desecrated by the resources industry and an ignorant mainstream culture. In remote Karijini National Park, the native bowerbird’s nest is built of natural matter, as well as glass and plastic rubbish. Meanwhile, white Australians are oblivious to Indigenous signs to respect the place as significant; their jumping and squawking if not malicious then outright disrespectful.

At times Tan seems to sermonise a little. After all, her experiences with nature, from pristine beaches in Western Australia to cassowaries in rainforests of far north Queensland, are in themselves privileges affordable to the few. It is only through her connections as a former Guardian journalist that she has the chance to meet locals such as Indigenous filmmaker and digital artist Tyson Mowarin in Roebourne, near Port Hedland.

On the other hand, Tan is self-conscious of her privileged urban status, ambivalent about her own motives and aware of her responsibility to respect Indigenous culture in her writing. As Asian Australian, she too is implicated in ‘the ugly historical mantle of coloniser’ (126). Tan is mortified when one prominent Indigenous man is annoyed by her trip, and ‘sick of Australians who used Indigenous Australia to "find themselves"’ (126).

Fair call. At a tavern in Nhulunbuy, Tan confronts her own bias as liberal city-slicker. Her recent travel partner and lover reveals himself to be anti-refugee, a supporter of Tony Abbott. However, he means her no offence, implicitly accepting her as Australian, regardless of her Asian heritage. Tan realises that agreeing with boat-stopping political rhetoric doesn’t necessarily make him an extremist. Racist attitudes are easily spread in digital environments but ‘face-to-face conversations fostered natural empathy’ (277). Finally, Tan rejects the notion that Pauline Hanson represents an Australian mainstream, ‘draped in the Southern Cross and speaking Strine’ (301).

Tan muses on reconciliation and how it could be achieved, eventually settling on Yothu Yindi’s vision of Indigenous and non-Indigenous worldviews enriching each other and merging, ‘like two long-separated rivers joining and running as one’ (229). Australian identity is elastic, and she need not be ‘trapped between Aboriginal, Asian and European cultures’ (175).

After 30 000 kilometres, Tan has a deeper acceptance of herself and feels connected to Australia. For the reader, Stranger Country does not really challenge the cartographic and textual map which embodies power structures. In that sense, Tan is unlike Robyn Davidson who literally and metaphorically, ‘plots a new track’ (Collis 184).

An Afterword ends her story with optimism. Stranger country led Tan to teach a complex, nuanced understanding of Australian history and politics. Tan now works for climate change with the NT Environment Centre. Readers might similarly be inspired.

Recently at a poetry workshop someone asked what most common recurrent feature/theme appeared in our poems. It wasn’t a question I had ever asked myself although I have been writing on and off for fifty years. But then with reflection it came easily: water. A stream, a river, a puddle; nailing one image was the struggle, for each one that slipped into my eye was overtaken by another. Rain in all its formulations as it fell, as it hit and bounced. Slipping over the lid of a water-butt or when it cascaded off a broken gutter. The dew, as melted frost, as jewels clinging to a spiders web. The colours and reflections in water, off water, through a glass to finely sparkling water. The life of a river and the sea that meanders along a frothy beach or sucks gloriously at the sand as it heaves back upon itself. The ripples of near-becalmed, the chops hitting a galloping sail-boat or the spume churning at the bows or a ploughed fantail, a fantasy jet-stream from the Princess of Nowhere. Or the beads of sweat, the tears, the single droplet domed on the table.

Yes, maybe water is my recurrent theme.

So I was delighted to discover this collection. The title alone drew me in. The author’s introduction explains her planning for the journey on foot. In her introduction Chinna explains her personal need to walk for the comfort of the rhythm of walking and its ability to immerse you in the landscape. This collection is full of passion and observation. Not offering any better ways to live on the planet but pointing out in mostly objective fashion what is, the ruination of what was and by the fact of omission what it might have been. Always understanding the reality of the natural world. Composing on the hoof and after reflection, with real focus on relaying the truth of the damage done to the balance of nature by generations of development.

From the UK the Swan River is a different world of colour, shape, flora and fauna, even smells, but our senses follow those ways walked and watched by Chinna. Each poem gives a tremendous sense of place. We can taste the water, acrid or salty, feel beneath our feet the mud or the tremor of lost, piped rivers. Floating into my mind were the lost rivers of London or the wetland fens and fields John Clare walked for thirty-odd years and wrote about with such distinctive passion and clarity. All the while being dazzled by the quality and rhythms of Chinna’s poems. Written as free verse you can feel the regulation, the rhythms of movement in the lines, even the standing and watching observations have their own timings. Sometimes half-rhymes hit the ear which may or may not have been written instinctively. 'Cut and Paste Lake' is a cross between travel and science and another variation of poetry on environmental change.

From the first poem, 'Writing on Water', the elements of the environs, information and potential danger are ticked in the opening line:

First you must wade through the minutiae

and throughout to the last two lines

Until it dries out you may not be able to understand

what water has to say.

(15)

And poems flow on: history, information and illustration. Of time spent following, walking the remaining and once-wetlands of the Swan Coastal Plain. We meet places and people. Poems acknowledge what is lost and, mesmerically at times, the author recreates scenery within, as well as the physical presence around her.

I like to recommend poems; here the choice is almost random as each one has something to say, whether of 'The Ghost Road of a Cartographer' or 'The House of Mercy' or 'The Earth Closet'. Especially the scenic: 'Beautiful Weeds':

The beautiful weeds are blazing on Clontarf Hill; yellow, white, cream-veined, purple gold. ... Three butterflies are jousting in the bluest air

(74)

Everywhere flowers and wildlife are highlighted in the landscape, escaping confinement. For example, finding the clash of today’s traffic surrounding a run-off pond being retaken by nature, or is it clinging on?

There is no compromise with Chinna’s journey. Her footsteps relive the past with the views and memories of others, conjure what was and thrust it into the present with the grit, grime and beauty of Australia. No humour but honesty for that world she was rediscovering. Those places unknown to me this side of the world: the Swan River Canyon (larger than the Grand Canyon!), numerous reserves, walks, swamps, roads and constructions have highlighted how thoughtless humans can be.

I will remember, 'The Eye' and 'The Furthest Shore' as a culmination of her journey and remarkable use of language.

From 'The Eye':

At night the river hones it’s craft, creaks and groans as it scrapes the hulls of vessels, tugs at moorings and deposits versions of itself further and further out to sea ... She feels the pores of the overheated ground opening like manifold breaths inhaling, as cool air falls into the earth.

(124)

And in 'The Furthest Shore':

I leave this at your ear for when you wake ...

 Your body

will recall the swing and stride of footsteps, Will follow these, will know the way ... rivers and creeks flow towards that great lake a multitude of birds arriving

(125)

SWAMP is memorable as the journey of a poet, an indictment of current environmental damage, what we have lost and how we are all responsible for what remains, no matter where we live.

Born and raised in Wellington, New Zealand, Stephen Oliver, after completing a journalism course, travelled and lived across Europe for many years. He then settled in Australia for 20 years before returning to New Zealand in 2007. Luxembourg is his nineteenth volume of poetry and its 70 poems, which include blank verse sonnets and many prose poems, range widely in history, place and person. The collection could be said to comprise journeys and portraits, real and imaginary, in lyrical, political and satirical modes.

The poem ‘Road Notes’ (24) is a good example of Oliver’s keen eye and use of vivid images in clipped, plain language and unexpected poetic logic. In its 31 parts, it recounts snapshots of encounters with the NZ landscape, while driving through it, and the creatures (horses, birds), buildings (childhood home, Huntley Power Station), and machinery (in particular, trains) that inhabit it and his memory:

III

Flat bottom clouds. Paperweights.

Slide above the horizon on wires and pulleys realistic as false scenery.

XI

Daylight. Interrogation light. The white

burning circle. Locomotive rounds on me briefly.

XIV

Velvet sheen is maize stubble, combed back

in lit rows, as I head north, buzz cut from sunrise to sunset. Paddocks either side. Autumn litter.

XXII

High beam hauls in the white line;

the Milky Way, its skid mark slung across the sky, runs out of steam.

The title poem, Luxembourg (68) gives us another type of journey, taken from Oliver’s European adventures. It is dedicated to Jossy Gerö, whose photo (taken by Barbara Leytus neé Neustädtl at Vegagasse, Vienna), graces the cover. In free blank verse, the poem recounts his arrival in the city ‘late spring, 1979’ and briefly describes a building he is drawn to before expanding the description to the ‘quiet quarter of the old city’ with its Café and Bar, ‘light spilling onto the square, girl’s laughter’. The last three lines allude to Gerö herself:

Over my shoulder, within the vaulted amphitheater of Central Europe, her raised, jade-green eyes, gazed out on the darkness from a balcony in Vienna.

It’s not clear if it is the woman herself or the photo that has haunted the narrator during his travels across Europe, and this turn from the real, from the concrete, to the imaginary is a feature of a number of poems. In ‘Impress’ (91), Oliver explores the plight of refugees:

They speak in the language of a landscape that has vanished, before them and after them …

He notes the occasions for their flight and what they must do in the ‘new land’: ‘they must forget / in order to rebuild’. He then ends with an extended metaphor, the imagination at work, on the memories the refugees carry:

Big or small, recollection

is an ornamental dagger encrusted with precious stones placed on display, always within view, though never within reach, a ritual object laid out in its glass cabinet, ghostly, yet intensely still.

This poem combines the journey and the portrait, though the latter is a generalised one. However, scattered throughout the collection are more concrete portraits, a number of which are for departed friends. These use different approaches to convey the essence of the lost one.

In the prose poem ‘Black Swans’ (92), the piece is mainly a description of the place – the swans, the harbour, the ‘scattering of pine trees, marram grass and driftwood’ – where the friend lived: ‘Perhaps he saw this too, in his last moments, alone in that cottage at The Spit.’

‘Still Breathing’ (95), however, is a narrative description of a friend’s last months, using a vocabulary drawn from the life of the man:

an undiagnosed

illness had your scent, pursued, hunted you down, woodsman.

The poem finishes with words from his ‘last, wilful email’:

‘We have to both survive as one of my goals is to come visit you while we are still breathing air.’ And you did.

Other portrait poems, real and imaginary, deal with the dreams of a woman in ‘the ruined house of grey planks … caught within the glare of her snow white/curtains (‘Lace’, 37); with the longing for far-off places of ‘a mother amongst vine leaves … on a Sardinian hillside’ (‘Amongst Vine Leaves’, 52); with the struggles of a monk, ‘his cell sweetened by the honey of his God’ (‘Written in the Margins’, 53); and with the ‘loss and despair’ of two German girls at the end of WW2, (‘The Lost German Girl’, 81).

Oliver constructs an evocative language that entices and draws the reader in. The image of the moon occurs frequently, each of them vivid and unexpected:

The moon was half. As though the act of clearing a space in the partially clouded sky had worn itself away.

('Undercover', 11)

Broken eggshell moon …

('Camber Swing', 21)

A scythe blade sharpened on the edge of the moon.

('Baked Potato', 34)

The white moon, a wild mare, driven into the canyon, clouds churned beneath its hooves …

('Dark Matter', 45)

And then there is the poem ‘The Great Rogatus’ (66) about a funambulist of the same name, ‘La Grand Seigneur of empty air’ who treads the high wire ‘adept as translation into a second language’. The poem and image could be seen as an idealised allusion to the creative act itself, especially given that Oliver refers again to the image in ‘Advice to a poet’, the second short prose poem in the first section ('morning') of his long satirical sequence ‘Open Learning Workshop’ (73):

… Guard against becoming a funambulist sans balancing pole. Failure means you are one step away from becoming a successful copywriter. Success means you are one step closer to never having to write another lousy word.

Oliver was once a copywriter, so he speaks with authority here. And in the last poem of the third section ('evening') of the sequence, ‘Advice to a young poet’, he states what is presumably his own poetic and ethos:

… Poetry is the embodiment of memory and truthful record plays homage to it. The literary critic is the foreign agent in the camp. His job is to encode untruth and misinformation … Know this, and secure faith in your own poetic instincts—if for no other reason that to capture one elusive, revelatory moment.

There are many such moments in this collection. Luxembourg shows a confident and skilled Stephen Oliver at the height of his powers, employing different techniques and using striking language and images. His poems take the reader on evocative and insightful external and internal journeys of people, place and, most important of all, imagination.

Les Wicks's writing embodies a gentle irony: 'you can't trust this incident we call being' (79). Belief, his fourteenth single-author book, ambles through the exhausted modern scene reflecting on elderly liberal indecision, the implications of neuroscience, euthanasia, and in an understated way contemporary politics. Wicks is frequently charming and sardonic, like a distant uncle you actually look forward to seeing in the holidays.

Beliefs, those fundamental things that possess us consciously or subconsciously, loom large but Wicks's touch is light. In 'Big Dig Gig' he ponders the potentialities of an imaginary divine game show in the afterlife.

Reincarnation was not the popular option but worthy of consideration. You could be smarter … I'm told the truly tired choose Nothing. No more traffic snarl or nosy bosses.

(17)

'From the Academy' is a gentle rebuke of the cult of self-help.

The warlocks of confidence know we need everything.

(64)

At times his cadence and diction are reminiscent of that other Les

There's news just in from neuroscience & it's not pretty. By some scholarly criteria we don't exist

(76)

and, from 'Man in Hagland', a reflection on a friend's marriage breakup

Divorce was major sorcery, poof all his money was gone. There were rumours the harridan had recommenced laughing Three years on, he'd chain the covens to the ovens & the iron. Impossibility is everywhere — one is now his boss, another ruled the country.

(72)

Wicks hits pay dirt with his musings on neuroscience in the longest poem in the book, the seven-page 'The Compassion, Rut & Self Proposition'. Someone I read once, I think it was the poet Czeslaw Milosz, a tormented Roman Catholic, said that the last believers in traditional orthodox religions will be the poets and artists, because of the unity of God's style. Poets, and all creative people, even the most post-modern, whether they are aware of what they are doing or not, resist the incursions of neuroscience and deterministic ideas, whether biological or philosophical. Or else their work is pointless jabbering. For otherwise why create, for indeed creation as we understand it is an impossibility. The arising of art will still happen but will mean something different in a neuro-determined world. Wicks boils down the issue in a pithy phrase 'no sin, only synapse'. Boom! You don't have to be religious to see how profoundly this could effect future generations. A brain scan at fourteen and off you go to the scrap heap.

if we're anything perhaps we're cabling & fluids senselessly cooking in the brainpan, bubble'n'squeak

(77)

Identity scaffolds are up but nothing gets built it's about the scaffolds ...

(78–79)

But how, Wicks asks, can a brain conscious of it's own determinism escape an endless reflexivity?

Neurotheology — god is in giggles. It is the hymn within our Personal Delusional System. Neuroplasticity — we can sculpt a future with our laughter, invent tranquillity or dance with fairies. Irrepressible glory — I will lay down my life to pretend it matters If it's all just blips then that makes our sorcery a perpetual surprise. There is yet more sounds like a prayer, I built my churches about this murmur (though the conniving cortex would say that).

(81–82)

Belief highlights the contingent, transient and circular nature of all beliefs. Belief is never something absolute, but must be practised. Belief contains some powerful images,

... seabirds, those carnivore nuns,

(69)

and

Meat wanders the pasture & knows life is a marinade.

(87)

The book is more of a playful philosophical tract than a book of poetry. Most of the poems read as chopped up prose and there is little in the way of conventional music or rhyme to break the monotony of his pacing, though his phrase-making keeps you on your toes.

From an ecological perspective, Wicks is highly ambivalent about technology. The image of air-conditioning pervades the book. Air-con has made human life possible in many places but also has a sedative, stifling effect. It confines as it sustains. Let alone the fuel it burns up.

The non-human is given special attention as well. His biography of an abandoned tennis shoe, 'A Nike Size 5 White Jogger Beside the Pacific Highway', asks us to pay close attention to a non-human object without the potential insult of anthropomorphising.

that slash of forsaken white, an afterthought of shoelace like a kind of surrender. Hey Mum, what's that sneaker doing there? He can almost feel its stories but his mother is fiddling with her traffic app.

(54–55)

Perhaps ironically, the book itself is physically too small, just one third bigger than a standard smartphone. As a result, the poems are cramped, what should be one pagers turn into two. At the risk of anthropomorphising, these poems need more lavish space to breathe. This is a nice size for a long essay or short novel but there are good reasons why most poetry presses print their books with larger dimensions than trade paperbacks.

Ultimately though, Belief displays an accomplished elder statesman of Australian poetry laying out with disarming agreeableness some of the fundamental questions of the near future. Often playful, sometimes circular, always self-aware in an optimistic rather than despairing way, Wicks makes a fine afternoon of reading in the sun for those content to dwell in questions with few answers.

While the poems of Anna Ryan-Punch’s debut collection range across the familiar territories of domestic life in suburban Australia, her sharp eye and deft lyricism reveal an unexpectedly rich landscape. These are skilfully crafted poems, her language spare and concise yet viscerally resonant. While these poems keep human relationships firmly in the foreground, they act against a seasonal backdrop of urban and suburban ecosystems in constant flux between climatic extremes.

The collection is uninterrupted by section breaks; the unbroken flow of poems creates a poetic terrain in which each thematic environment blends into the next, without imposed boundaries defining the lens through which each poem should be read. Suburbia and seasonality underscore poems dealing with domestic life. Feminism intersects with family history and loss of faith. Romantic love overlaps with illness and parenthood. To stretch this ecosystem analogy to its extreme, motherhood is the closest Ryan-Punch comes to offering the collection a thematic substratum.

Ryan-Punch shows a remarkable flair for navigating broad themes through the smallest of gestures. Throughout the collection, some of the most emotionally resonant poems are narrative, many delving into childhood memories. The problematic interconnection of memory and perception are beautifully elucidated in ‘Divagations’.

Sometimes, when you move on it’s hard to look back. Something muscular in the neck a crick in the past.

(68)

‘The Coldest Day’ and ‘Bone Buried’ are two particularly powerful examples of works that mine memory and family history for contemporary meaning, using childhood objects to summon visceral recollections of significant moments. A lost hairbrush in ‘Bone Buried’ recalls a child’s magnification of guilt and sudden awakening to parental inconsistency. The texture of mismatched blankets in the opening lines of ‘The Coldest Day’ viscerally recreates the moments a marriage breaks apart. And later in the poem, the recollection of her mother’s composure manages the paradox of being spare yet brimming with character and insight.

The coldest day since 1947, my father in at the usual time and then nothing usual. He brings me a big box of Lego. Trembles back over the floor and in the doorway tells my mother he has met someone else. She could have smoked him out months ago with a look but she kept those embers firmly below earth. Her eye is coal … A pulse in her thumb against glass sends Jurassic ripples through her wine. She is otherwise stillness.

(10)

This collection examines family and motherhood with an unflinching gaze and while unsentimental in tone, the poems allow for the presence of tenderness and vulnerability. Childhood scenes are cunningly observed to expose their hindsight value as lessons for the poet as a parent. Ryan-Punch concludes ‘Heredity’ with a stanza of lyrical disquiet about whether she is fated to repeat the parenting patterns laid down in her own childhood.

So when her ‘how dare you’ surged unbidden to my lips I paused in history’s slipstream the slight vertigo of stepping onto an unmoving escalator.

(71)

The narrative pieces are counter-balanced throughout the collection with short, intense poems that play with lyric obscurity. Works such as ‘Stasis’, ‘Replace Those Humanely Destroyed’, ‘Smoking Near the Intake Vents’ and ‘The Drowner’ all inhabit multiple thematic regions, touching on politics, suburban ecology and family dynamics. Yet, for the most part, any obscurity in meaning works to enhance atmosphere rather than create distance or confusion.

There was something in her bitterness, strange and smooth. His little death had cut the roughness from her and left her glass.

(55)

Similarly, in the pieces that explore illness or physical injury, any lack of certainty about meaning works to evoke the ambiguities of what we experience when health is disrupted. ‘Self-autopsy (after Angela Carter)’, ‘Repairs’ and ‘Elevated’ are all examples of work that encourage empathic connection and suggestion rather than laying the meaning on the page like an exposed nerve.

My breast was a delicate journey, filigree of rib, sinew flecked aside an intricate dance of skeleton and pulp. Below I reached a hollow and stopped: uncertain. Thrumming hard, ballooned in ecstasy was nothing precise and all things barbarous.

(50)

Behind the focus on social relationships, these poems act against the physical backdrop of suburban architecture and urban infrastructure. Poems are contained within the suburban heartland of rental housing, cafes, churches, community swimming pools, hospitals, museums and concert halls. They are in motion, moving by car, taxi and tram. Despite what at first glance could be mistaken for anthropocentrism, each poem is embedded in the natural world. Throughout the collection, weather and the seasons all underscore the social and architectural landscape. ‘January’, ‘Birdless’ and ‘Trampoline’ are just a few of the many heatwave poems, demonstrating how thoroughly entangled domestic relationships and suburban social behaviours are with the extremes of Australian summer.

Gales increasing on hard rubbish night. Brown Christmas trees blow up the road, up the footpath festive tumbleweeds. … Parched clay cracks around the foundations jagged gaps in the bathroom wall reopen. Dead Christmas trees drift back downhill. We can look at the sun without squinting but hardly notice the smoke.

(36)

‘The Coldest Day’, on the other hand, expresses suburban adaptation to the opposite meteorological extreme.

Midwinter and the pilot light keeps going out. Extra mismatched blankets creep from hiding places under stairs and above leopard-print polyester, floral cotton and boiled wool, hard from the hot wash. My mother layers them up and the general effect is not bohemian.

(10)

In this work of close and unflinching attention to the minutiae of suburban life, Ryan-Punch explores how the weightiest of issues, like birth, death and family, are inextricably linked with the smallest physical details of our daily existence.  Although it is sad news that, after more than three decades, Five Islands Press has now ceased production of any new titles, this skilfully crafted collection is a laudable endpoint to the Press’s impressive publication list.

Pete Mullineaux’s How To Bake A Planet opens with ‘Dancing in the Street’ a poem of interpretation of coexistence:

This could be the pavement of romance – random intimacy of bodies about to make contact like bubbles on a screen-saver,…

(13)

‘Nice poetry’ one would say and glide through remaining lines, and that would be missing the core of its magnetism and feeling instead only electric charges. J W Mackail in Lectures on Poetry (Longmans, Green & Co, London, 1914), says:

… poetry, like life, is one thing, but that this one thing is perpetually transmuting and recreating itself in the progress of history. Essentially a continuous substance or energy, poetry is historically a connected movement, a series of successive integrated manifestations. Each poet, from Homer or the predecessors of Homer to our own day, has been, to some degree and at some point, the voice of the movement and energy of poetry: in him, poetry has for the moment became visible, audible, incarnate; and his extant poems are the record left of that partial and transitory incarnation. (xi)

…

Poetry will become the nobler interpretation of an ampler life. That vision is in the future. (xiii)

Nature, now is being saved as screen-saver. That is the present, and that is interpreted in a subtle manner in the poem. Serenity is getting digitalised, so is peaceful coexistence. It is not human nature that is progressing; it is the natural world that is getting transmuted; it is the ‘eco’ that is getting morphed by human activities. If the partners in the poem, ‘Dancing in the Street’, are to be taken as Mother Nature and ‘manly’ human entity, the meaning rises to a new level of understanding. Then a new meaning emerges:

But no, whoever you are stranger we have been singled out, then coupled: partners by chance in this public-private moment, courting like doves, necks dipping side to side – even our ‘sorry’ synchronised, both going one way then the other, sharing this brief fault in normality, an alternative universe where bubbles freely merge – our separate paths set to converge.

(13)

Courting is a nice way of exploitation, if one goes by Freudian principles, and that is the only continuous movement happening since time immemorial between Mother Nature and ‘manly’ human entity. It has taken too much time perhaps for Nature to realise the true sense behind human courting. Now the paths seem to diverge, looking at the way She is protesting; yet the separate paths can be set to converge by reestablishing trust, by drawing the attention of all concerned, by taking to dancing in the street to slow down the ‘change’. It is with this kind of mesmerising ‘goggles’ that How To Bake A Planet raises above common poetry.

The poem, ‘Small Hungers’ begins with fidgeting toes but progresses towards,

In truth it had been a grey affair: low – tide: cold, misty – the pebbles laced with tar, so instead we have the comforting heat, clear water in a jug; …

(14)

Climate change is now a grey affair, the fickle weather pattern is a punctuated effort of Nature to teach the living world a lesson on ‘mismanagement’. When the poet says, ‘the pebbles laced with tar’, a scared pair of eyes of tar dripping pelican stares at our subconscious eyes, yet we move to comfort, controlling room temperature, reaching out to clear water in a jug, unmindful of tarred sea, tarred ocean floor, melting hotness of world, melting delicate species of the world.

Regrettable warfare, contrasting with colour, is seen in the poem ‘Child Soldiers’:

A genuine soldier looks on, somewhat befuddled, … … Familiar neutral grey tones of an Irish town but everywhere, patches of red – the soldier’s jacket, the crimson shawls; beneath one rust-red roof an unidentifiable blaze glimpsed through a narrow window; three scarlet ribbons trickle down from a paper helmet; the rosy cheeks of the boys and girls.

(23)

The scarlet ribbon that a child wanted so badly that it hurt a father’s heart, is some imagery that no reader will miss, but here ‘conscientious’ word play will create stillness as the reader thinks of excessive ‘red’.

Helplessness faced by gentle souls in this roughed world is seen in the poem, ‘Rest Assured’. The poet’s impulse to leap out to do something is felt by the reader, and the rush of words makes one grab an opportunity to participate in that ‘doing something’ but then it gets down to:

rest assured – we will have opened our doors onto normality, re-fuelled the tanks of convention, hand-braked the possibilities.

(24)

‘First Fruit’ is a poem of life’s force and flags down the reader’s thoughts to halt, feel and proceed:

Neither an apple or a fig – but a ripe luscious cherry tomato, a ready to burst red-hot globe, rising from the ground – wild, fertile, unashamed.

(30)

Poetic thought continues to the next serious tone in the poem, ‘Inflation Theory’, where the poet speaks of ‘Gravity’ of the present situation of our living planet. When said repeatedly, ‘Gravity can only slow it’, the extreme importance laid on the awareness of ongoing environmental crisis pops up. The poet says:

But if we could just outgrow it – our addiction to inflation: pack it in. This universe expands, we know it, Gravity can only slow it.

(31)

Though it seems like a plausible solution, it is as said earlier in the same poem, ‘we surely cannot win’. Given the rate at which the planet is deflating, that slowing Her down is beyond mortal thinking is well expressed in the poem, ‘Crunch Time’:

But now the Man appears, kicking dust up from the asphalt, beckons us to cross a river of spilt oil onto the weighing scales.

(32)

Though it seems that the poet is talking about an old car going to scrap yard, the bigger picture of humankind treating the planet as scrap yard looms large in the subconscious of the reader.

It is the poem ‘How to Bake a Planet’ that adds momentum to the ‘turning and turning’ poetic thoughts in both the poet and reader, and if the present anarchy is ‘climate change’ then as the great poet Yeats said ‘the centre cannot hold’. In ‘How to Bake a Planet’ a recipe is given and it is already cooked beyond the point of being rightly cooked:

Increase heat gradually, stirring continuously. Flambé the mushrooms! Throw everything into a sealed container with generous lashings of crude oil.

(34)

Sealed containers filled with nuclear waste that sit comfortably in oceanic floors, ‘oil’ that has become a new oceanic water layer exhibiting brilliant ‘Interference of light’, disappearing green causing enough envy in a lesser world of ‘dead living’, such things have set the timer; yet the poet says:

Set timer – bake indefinitely… … serve chilled.

(34)

‘chilled’ here is not positioned as a word, but as a one word human story.

Zola Budd’s famous answer to a question in the interview ‘The fall’ about her cathartic running, ‘Running was my escape’ is  powerfully used to poetic advantage in the poem, ‘Zola Budd awaits Roger Bannister on Mars’ as the poet turns it:

Instead I have the dead heat of this dead planet, where everything is old news; the newsreels in my mind repeat themselves in black and white. The truth is I had to run twice as far.

(44)

Each and every poem in How to Bake A Planet relates to the present crisis in its own way and at the surface level it looks calm and commonplace poetic experiences, but deep down it is in a ‘triple point’ where the agony of being part of the society that is mutilating Nature, helplessness and hope coexist in equilibrium. Day Lewis in The Poetic Image (The Alden Press, London, 1947) says: 'The poet’s task, too, is to recognize pattern, whenever he [or she] sees it, and to build his [her] perceptions into a poetic form which by its urgency and coherence will persuade us of their truth'. (36)

The pattern of Pete Mullineaux’s thought is revealed in the title of the book, ‘How To Bake A Planet’. The untaught craft of poetry to represent the fluidity of complex thoughts would fall flat if the pattern is not recognised in the beginning, before the poet comes to dance in the street. But when the reader holds firmly his gentle hands, it would be a delightful waltz to the end, reverberating sense.

Intact is not just a book of ecopoetry, it is a powerful expression of exasperation in words of an Opera, a ‘libretti’, with their ‘librettists’, Massimo D’ Arcangelo, Anne Elvey, Helen Moore. Like in true Opera, the poets’ structured vocals raises the reader’s mind to an exalted state, simultaneously pushing the subconscious to guts, leaving behind a rage of helplessness as felt when reading:

These things are not intact: air and wing and bird, habitat and human, stone and moss.

(Elvey, 18)

Wipes his smile dry. Something evil’s in his eyes. Monster balanced on two legs. He kneels. Skins a fox alive inside its den. Wants the fur all for himself.

(D'Arcangelo, 26)

plastic/metal/paper/glass; cast tea-bags, hair-balls, peelings into the red, thrashing mass …

(Moore, 38)

Like painting which draws admiration by the resemblance of things of which we do not admire the originals, Anne Elvey’s poetry draws the readers’ attention to Nature. Attention to natural things so long given to  perverted understanding  by human society. Like breath on winter glass, it obscures the reader’s apathy towards one’s own surrounding system. Hence, an untold heaviness settles when the curtain raises to ‘Intact’:

These things are not intact: air and wing and bird, habitat and human, stone and moss. … A garbage truck lifts its arm and groans. There is a wattlebird perched outside looking as whole as a loss (extinction) I believe.

(18)

That sense of ‘loss’ to living world is of human making, a truth that stings and it is then that ‘the tremor under the skinny breast’ (18) is felt by the reader.

The poet hisses in her poem, ‘Kin and Feral’:

… I hiss

at the cat, poison the rat, and look for the rainbow lorikeet. In the costal banksias its high note hangs over the muddled garden. Its blue crown darts into the loquat. Nearby the apple is fruiting. I will net the tree.

(24)

The poet is yodelling about human avarice. A dozen lives live by, at any given moment, at any given place of human settlement, but human eyes can only see the ‘damage’ behind each and not the abundant symphony in Nature.

Blood shot pair of eyes of the poet adds crimson to her voice in the poem, ‘Mining Mining Mining’. As the oxides of carbon burn, raising difficulties in breathing of all things that breathe in this natural world, feeding enough oxygen to starving lungs, the poet says:

Plumes were slick with unbecoming (ill ill) illness gave only to silence An eagle swept the atmosphere – pelican and musk duck crossed the skies under a sooty sun

(40)

The poet asks to be the sufferer, feel the suffered by breaking:

Might we fall out of silence to be the burn to be the rock blasted sheer from the surface of the stone

(42)

The poem ‘Mortal Mortal’ that breathes ‘the dank air of plastic, compost and rust’ (64) also addresses the very real happening (without alternate truths) of spoilt rivers, habitat burning, over-population of some species as a chancy mechanism for survival, hunting and damages incurred. When the poet calls forth Lazarus, it is to the climatic narrative of exemplifying the power ‘over the last and most irresistible enemy of humanity – death’. The poet begins ‘Mortal Mortal’:

Quick the destination of our deaths. ...

(64)

The poet then leads on to Lazarus, she is lamenting the death of humanity in humans and asks for its restoration.

The poet kicks up an emotional storm in the poem, ‘Pete the Pelican’:

In the front garden of the block of flats I see a plastic pelican with a grey fish, also plastic, hanging from her bill.

(70)

Speaking of ‘Pete’ the pelican who died after feasting on seventeen plastic bags, this plastic grey fish 'hanging from her bill’ is sarcastic and quick. As the poet brings down ‘a coolamon moon’ to hang 'over a wary track' (86), another librettist of this Opera, a voice of the present world, a poet with ‘hope’, Massimo D’Arcangelo gently says, shuffling the role of sense organs, in  ‘My Eyes Can Breathe’:

The cement blocks stacked by the construction site are covered in snow today. My eyes can breathe. … The abandoned machines that line the fence are covered in rust, home to stray dogs; the fields , other worldly, sucked dry by burnt motor oil. … It’s night. I see only trees. My eyes can breathe.

(20)

In a poem on delusional end, ‘Interitum’, D'Arcangelo says:

A monster propped on two legs.  He waits.  Looks. Holds the forest’s breath.  Through a gash he watches his blood mix with the earth. Wipes his smile dry. ...

(26)

Who should hold the forest’s breath? How? It is a question to the startled reader and to understand the avarice of human actions, the reader has to read the poem over again.

In his 'Landscape with Still-life' poems, D'Arcangelo creates a sense of human failure costing the planet more than intended, thus, in the poem ‘Landfill’ he says:

The landfill arcs across the industrial park. From the city, it looks like a volcanic mountain. The bordering rivers run with detergent sludge and chemicals, beige brooks that feed the birds.

(34)

Pointing at the horizon, the poet says:

Seagulls flop at the horizon, stuttering forward without aim on quivering wings, their legs coiled for one last push, one aweless lunge back toward the sky.

(34)

It is the exasperation of other lives about the degraded ecosystem, their disappearing habitat, their erased part of link in the natural world that gets highlighted when the seagulls lunge back toward the sky.

As on cue, the poet continues his imagery in ‘Marble Cave in the Apuan Alps’:

... An owl overlooks as his Mother is licked dead by the flames, turns to the sky and pleads for help. But the actual eagle

does nothing.

The cuckoo’s stopped singing its solo. The wild rabbit’s skipped off in the spoils. The skittish groundhog’s underground.

(44)

After taking in all the vicious human attacks, even Nature loses her majesty as the poet imposes on the Sun here in the poem. In yet another poem on still-life, ‘Meat processing and Butchering Plant’ the poet says:

Around me, men with blank expressions take turns at intervals without a word.

(58)

It is not just a butchering plant, it is the whole planet that the poet fills in where the society around is moving on with the same blank expressions, taking turns and without a word.

Impersonal rationalisation accentuates magical imagery of poetry in ‘Butcher Trailer on a Country Road’ where the target reader squirms in inexplicable agony when the words take a turn in:

But no thoughts turn this way, nobody slows to think that this same day, in a few hours, a little later, not long, before it’s even dark they’ll have no tongues, … in a sputtering torrent of swaying white slather.

(52)

‘The Forest No Longer Smiles At Itself’ is a poem of warning, as the poet says:

Your trees no longer breathe. Your gaze is speechless disapproval, unable to comprehend the plot of its child, humankind – who, plundering his own home, steals from

himself.

(66)

Taking up turns, a gentle voice stirs the subconscious mind of the reader; Helen Moore, pushes the mind to arrive at knowledge beyond through her unrestrained poetic imagery, as when in her poem, ‘Sonnet on the Verge’, she says:

Only when frost comes hammering along the verges, with Winter’s tempering hand the truth of it emerges.

(22)

Yes, the reader starts over again to read that the spring glories drop by suddenly after the poet says:

Daisies, the lushing up of all the lay-bys, which artfully conceals crisp curls of plastic, fag-ends & the packaging of petrol station pick-me-ups –  …

(22)

A leap later in the meadow that slopes to an aching stream, the poem, ‘Memesis/Nemesis’ says that:

we’re pilgrims come to reverence

this mythical plant – a chimera

that’s animal & vegetable in form. …

this Ceridwen come before her time

gnashing teeth,

her galvanised desires

mutated beyond the ancient rites

of husbandry.

(28)

Metastasising junk in our ecosystem is the next truth that is laid out in the poem, ‘Away’. Sharp-witted seagulls, scarcity of water, landfills, bring acute images to one’s mind and is suddenly contrasted with our fight for cleanliness. This juxtaposition of untidy world against tidy immediate surroundings brings profound effect of futile efforts towards the planet when the poet says:

Mostly you shirk these overtures, keep your neat

segregation:

plastic/ metal/paper/glass; cast tea-bags, hair-balls, peelings into the red, thrashing mass …

(38)

As in the poem ‘On The Butterfly Path’ the poet hopes:

a distant beacon – & all were pointing the way I too was heading…

(84)

It is the way the world is heading too, with anxious dismembered mind of hope, a hope that ‘everything will be ok’ and cunning shift of responsibilities that ‘Nature takes care of Herself’.  Helen Moore captures this apathy wonderfully in her poetry.

This journey of intense awareness continues to grip the reader like some invisible magnetic field all through, just so, on completion of the book of poetry, the reader chooses not to close but flips back to page 18 again for another round of reading. ‘Arias’ of the trio in ‘Intact’ successfully captures the inner yearning of the reader to express helplessness and provides psychological relief of nothingness. When diversity in Nature is breached by human actions, it becomes literary responsibility to fill sensible awareness in all available blank spaces, and take a step towards restoring orderliness of the living world. Intact does that poetically, with precision.