The precise nature of poetic form was a key issue in the so-called ‘poetry wars’ of the 1960s. Was it to be imposed on the subject-matter through time-honoured procedures (fixed metres, rhyme, metaphor, and so on)? Or did it have to grow from whatever gave rise to the impulse to write in the first place, and respond with a certain wildness to a unique act of creativity? In these debates, there was a sense too that form – especially in a place like Australia with a deep sense of cultural inferiority – could eventually become ossified and alienating, and just another means of imposing conformity on individuals hoping for some degree of liberation from an oppressive status quo.

When David Malouf published ‘Interiors’ in Four Poets back in 1962, he made it clear that he was a disciple of discipline, embracing formal poetic structure and impressing with his commitment to craftsmanship. When he returned to poetry with Typewriter Music in 2007, his attitude remained more or less unchanged, exemplified by the elevated diction, intelligent use of line-breaks, sensitivity to ambiguity, powerful wit, and a deep familiarity with European civilisation. With this book, the third in his comeback, he remains true to this fundamental artistic direction. However, as I read and re-read this latest collection, those warnings about form posed fifty years ago kept surfacing in my mind: was there a danger of technique becoming an end in its own right, and of making poetry an embellishment of reality rather than helping us more fully appreciate what it means to be human?

Human experience, as it happens, is mirrored in the structure of An Open Book, which starts with fourteen poems on childhood, and closes with a suite entitled ‘A Knee Bent to Longevity’, made up of ten poems on the topic of mortality. The rest of the poetry falls naturally between these points, and takes us through a diverse range of subjects and moods. References to breathing occur throughout, and this fact hints at an important characteristic of the poetry collected here: breath is a kind of living and dying in miniature that we generally remain unconscious of, and attention to it helps to bring us back to those other things in the world that we take too much for granted.

‘Hardly a day passes I don’t think of him / in the asylum’ writes Mary Oliver in her poem on the German pianist and composer Robert Schumann, and it is Schumann’s Kinderszenen (meaning ‘scenes from childhood’) that provide Malouf with the inspiration for these reminiscences about his early life. Unlike Schumann’s music, which to me conveys the innocence and physical energy of the child, Malouf is more attracted by the psychological aspects of his growing up. The atmosphere at times is Freudian, especially in lines such as ‘Privacies. Tongue-and-groove / whispers at a knothole, / bare bathroom / plumbing, bare bodies, / shock-white minus their clothes’ (‘Binomial’). Other pieces in the suite, however, attempt to fill in something of the social background. One of these is ‘The Brisbane Line’, an evocation of the threat of Japanese invasion in the 1940s:

Thunder     Mitsubishi bombers on the move An apocalyptic four-o-clock Brisbane sky     redistributed an hour south over the border in unnumbered raindrops     pendant sun-traps at the tip of hoop-pine needles

(12)

Indirectness is typical of Malouf’s style: he likes to approach his themes metaphorically. Here, the metaphor is created through juxtaposition: thunder is the sound of Japanese bombs exploding over the north of Australia, while at the end of the poem, the drops of rain poised on the tips of pine needles allude again – this time in terms of their appearance – to bombs about to be released from their hatches. Another feature evident here is the careful attention to word-choice. The ‘tic’ in ‘apocalyptic’ leads on to ‘four-o-clock’, while ‘redistributed’ and ‘unnumbered’ puzzle with their calculated unexpectedness – I can only guess that ‘redistributed’ suggests the redrawing of the map of Australia that led to the proposed creation of the Brisbane Line, while ‘unnumbered’ implies ‘unlike the bombs, which all carried a serial number’. The threat to domestic security which looms at the edges of this poem is further heightened by the words ‘trap’ and ‘needle’, both of which have affirmative meanings as well as negative connotations.

After the fraught family scenes of Kinderszenen, Malouf modulates into a more everyday, life-embracing key. There are domestic poems, dealing with topics such as the return of Spring, windows and how they frame our view of the world, the minor gods of the hearth, and the delight of freshly baked bread. Italy also gets a look in in three poems, including ‘Cockcrow at Campagnatico’, possibly one of the few poems in English about the hard, aspirated ‘c’ of the Tuscan dialects. In addition, translation continues to play a part in Malouf’s return to poetry: just as Earth Hour included versions of work by Horace, Baudelaire and Heine, An Open Book translates Horace, Dante and Ronsard, displaying a deft use of slant rhyme in his renditions of the latter two poets. Here we also find three of the more challenging poems in the book, ‘The Double Gift’, the very elusive ‘Understood’, and the following deceptively simple text entitled ‘Asleep at the Wheel’:

Asleep at the wheel     the tumble of cumulus and pasture one as they go streaming but in all that speed of passage a slowing almost to a standstill as we take in the leaf long-dead mid-fall suspended in a web     the fox’s eye as it glances up from the kill In one sense asleep but in the others alert to each occurrence     each breath as it detaches from the time-flow the unspooling self holding fast and faster to a highway without name or number or destination

(52)

Once again, indirectness is crucial. At first, we might read the poem as a description of a car travelling at high speed through landscape. The countryside streams past in a seamless flow, but there are also moments in which the world stands still and small details make their presence felt with a kind of emblematic quality (the web and the eye are also small ‘wheels’ of a kind). But to make sense of the poem’s title, we gradually come to see that ‘asleep at the wheel’ is a metaphor for a state of mind in which the self goes through life on busy automatic pilot. Locked in our hectic trajectories, we are generally oblivious of what awaits us in the end – it is only occasionally that we acknowledge the presence of death in the scheme of things. Malouf provides a magical jolt in the poem by means of a telling ambiguity, taking the innocuous set phrase ‘in one sense’ and brilliantly recasting its meaning with what he adds to it: ‘but in the others’. Alertness to the physical act of breathing allows the mind to acknowledge its predicament: it is caught in time and will eventually ‘unspool’ (another echo of the wheel image).

This poem hints at the web of life and the idea of natural cycles, but Malouf’s attitude to wilderness is ambiguous and only intermittently ecological. A key poem in this regard is ‘At Pennyroyal II’.  In certain lines, he is willing to entertain the idea of an order beyond the human, writing ‘There are no laws / for this, or if there are we do not know them, / though we live, as the land does, / in their gentle governance’ (38). Yet, this statement is echoed in a very different poem about household gods – they too are ‘[m]ute reminders of what it is that we are part of’ (32) – so this order Malouf grapples with may be a supernatural one. At the end of ‘At Pennyroyal II’, he returns to the idea of ‘[an] order we cannot see / the grounds of’, yet declares that this order is one that human beings ‘acknowledge and keep’, an assertion impossible to reconcile with any accurate appraisal of our contemporary ecological predicament.

Things come full circle in the final section of the book, and the seriousness of the theme of ageing and mortality brings out the best in Malouf. ‘The young man may be beautiful,’ wrote Victor Hugo, ‘but the old man is grand’, and it is grandeur rather than beauty that count at this point. The depiction of an elderly fellow as ‘a walking / coffin draped in black / in which / younger livelier selves / are buried’ (78) suggests a fairly bleak outlook with regard to this ultimate mystery, as does the description of life as ‘Mixed messages / mixed blessings / A world of happen / -stance (some call it Providence) / that hands us / a mare’s nest to be picked / over or pieced together’ (‘As Living Is’). And yet Malouf also sees this phase of existence as a time when we might live more in accord with the world (‘A Word to the Wise’), show a greater appreciation for the occasional workaday miracle (‘Small Wonders’) and become able to shift our focus ‘to a day, long in the making, / that the calendar at last / finds time for’ (‘A Knee Bent to Longevity’). Nevertheless, the fact that almost all these poems are written from the perspective of an impersonal ‘we’ renders Malouf’s response to old age persistently general and remote.

True to Malouf’s disciplined orientation, the diction in An Open Book is consistently literary, derived primarily from the decorum of the page rather than the rawer quasi-spontaneities of spoken language. You rarely see a contraction in these poems – no don’t, or won’t, or can’t, or isn’t – because this would lower the tone too much. (It is paradoxical that Malouf links poetic inspiration closely to breath when his work is so meticulously scripted.) This is borne out by the sprinkling of hyper-formal words, mainly derived from Latin, such as ‘insinuant’ (15), ‘exhilarant’ (23) and ‘executant’ (69), as well as the repeated flights of magniloquence – ‘The spirit that makes the letter of this day red / has not yet descended, but the birds / have, and are setting to with their doo-del-do, their chuck / and chortle, as if the hour, like the planet, / was theirs to decorate, as they have the yard with their sky-blue droppings’ (23). This bookishness enables him to make wonderfully effective use of clichés and stock phrases from colloquial language, because the contrast with his default mode is so striking. This results in memorable moments such as the revitalising of the phrase ‘in one sense’ in ‘Asleep at the Wheel’. Other equally impressive examples include a presentation of sunset – ‘the refulgence / of a lava-spill long past that makes / our day     that makes / our time’ (55) and the delineation of time as a polite old gentleman, ‘dancing / attendance on us only / to distract us from the fact he has already / made himself scarce’ (75), elegantly expressing the notion that, with every passing moment, our allotted span has been permanently reduced.

The linking of pairs of words on the basis of alliteration is an unusual element in Malouf’s diction:

• ‘Smoothly / concealed in foam and frolic’ (10)
• ‘the mesh and mash of things’ (28)
• ‘the mess and muddle we mischief into’ (32)
• ‘however rich and ripe or rare’ (37)
• ‘the seethe and scuffle / of lapsed encyclicals’ (45)
• ‘A honeyeater, up / -side-down at tilt and tumble’ (71)

In this device, a purely typographic consideration overrides precision. In actual fact, the force of each of the paired words is weakened in combination, so that it tends to mean less rather than more.

The American painter Andrew Wyeth once said that his aim was not ‘to exhibit craft but rather to submerge it’, so that it served his efforts to express ‘beauty, power, and emotional content’. An Open Book demonstrates the difficulties an unsubmerged devotion to poetic technique can run into. There are signs of this in the frequent instances of disproportion, including the use of portentous titles such as ‘Brisbane Line’ to write about a storm or ‘A la Recherche’ for a short poem on remembering. More serious is the glaring disproportion sometimes revealed in his metaphors: to describe a garden spider web as ‘a launching-pad / for space walks, sky-hung / deathcamps, sticky ends’ (42) is both insensitive to historical realities and plainly inaccurate. It would seem that the noble pursuit of formal perfection can lead a writer to relegate experience to a secondary position and, in some cases, actively set out to minimize it so that it doesn’t get in the way of the linguistic flourishes, the dazzling flashes of wit, the erudite cultural gestures. On many occasions, both experience and poetry are treated by Malouf like the poor snails in the poem ‘Sagra’, hanging above ground ‘like armoured angels’, climbing ‘on rainbow bridges’ to ‘their Götterdämmerung’, only to be snuffed out in a puff of steam, leaving ‘their bleached-white ministry of silence a long Te Deum to voicelessness’ (36).

Within days of reading That Sight, I found myself quoting from it on a social media platform. Amidst angry backlash toward the local Council at having authorised the destruction of some trees to make way for a new building, I quoted a line from '(My) Country', 'I am the moment Gaudi grows a tree in his cathedral' (12), wanting to highlight the moment in the monumental and vice versa. What comes into existence and ghosts its removal? The elusive ‘starting point’ Hélène Cixous muses on and teases out extensively in Philippines. Apparitions, the residual as afterimage, once eyes are closed, trees are removed, the comments lost in the web.

This is the thrill of That Sight, the spaces Mossammaparast is in dialogue with, are not transcendent, they are planes of experience. What Cixous refers to as 'the scenes of the encounter'. The circumstantial is denied to give floor to immanence, recognition and reverie. Integration and often disintegration, lost and found, occur simultaneously, freed of geographical bounds. Slippage is everywhere and everywhere becomes sacralised. Women’s bodies are celebrated in a myriad of expressions, earthy, vital, mobile and re-balanced.

Knowledge is a single point but the ignorant have multiplied it. A tree is a tree, a woman is a woman. The tree is a woman lifting her song, blossoms the heart of a woman. I am her now, flowering.

(35)

This inversion of metaphor folds impossible habitations, tree is becoming a woman, song is becoming a flowering. Other encapsulates and proliferates. Awareness is brought into question and what might be perceived as visions are sensed as interpenetrations and loci. Language is vivified and given an agency which gathers power and detonates as:

women are hanged with hyphens, strapped with adjectives, quietly like the countdown of a bomb.

(35)

Mossammaparast experiments with a variety of techniques, devices and stylistic shifts throughout the book, for the most part successfully, as a marriage of intent and form and often in ways which invite the reader’s sight to mimic an occurrence on the page or within the enunciation. Consider the physical act involved while reading the interplay of italic and stroke in the following from 'Wife of Lot':

Dissolving like a cathedral | the slow arc of your breath | the refuge shelter | the dust heap | all the blue finery of birds |

You are knocking on the door | I am out of here | I am

(58)

Here is one part of the tapped magic of Mossammaparast’s poetry, a syntactic resonance which calmly surfaces a measured unsettling. Her gaze rarely lingers, crosshatched with sharp observations and clipped rhythms. Ideas move through lines with the speed of a darting eye. The poem which provides the title of the collection; ‘That Sight’ (70) with its short vowels and caesura bars, meters words across the page like a series of aural blinks. The mythic is recast as what is re-collected is encircled in the present. Or returning to ‘Wife of Lot’,  'Turning back | for that last moment before' (58).

This is altered time, glimpsed and relative, abbreviated and non-linear as the book’s sections, titled as, 'Brief', 'Briefer' and 'Briefest'. A far from simple exploration of the morphology of tense.

When there’s nowhere to go we go into the past, where it all went. Life commits us to verbs, the subject's meaning incomplete without its predicate.

(20)

Each image has an acute vanishing point or, in time, a disintegration. Territories are named, while the points encompassed are lost to vast, impossible distances. Names are displaced or trespassed by ‘other’ without distrust or uncertainty, rather with a deepened trust in the temporality of those signifiers. Consider the parentheses in the title of the poem ‘(My) Country’: how they contain that first word with a tight little knot.

This threading continues in 'The Call', 'David reimagines the world' as the sun rises, and his superannuation comes through, embroidered through the stasis of architecture, packed bags in a doorway and where he stands at a sink. There is a slight jar in the line, 'The boat is anchored down the road', the connection hovers wrongly, displaced, yet transmits again a potential exit, held, aground, immobile.

Yesterday, which was many days ago, his wife went missing, climbing a ladder

(4)

These might be disappearances or escapes. Mossammaparast is more inclined draw our attention to where a subject has moved away from and trace an artefact, than tell where to find it. Images are unmoored, presence is recognised by flux and rest. What respires grows wild when untended. Life is bartered for, here, between words on a page, between poet and reader, where energy is expended.

Here, loss might be a starting point. The body returned to a sensuous place within nature. Politics appears, husking a kernel of future life. Within every naming is the immemorial and with that naming, both a history and the potential for awakening.

This is also why God is so deep

(10)

Deep within story, but also, 'so deep' as if God might be extracted or sunk in. The line appears in a poem stamped diagonally across the page with the words 'YOU CANNOT READ THIS' in large, bold font, obscuring the poem without rendering it illegible. Whether connoting taboo or some imagined bureaucratic denial, the reader is impelled to read beyond, through or around the stamp. It feels an awkward device to employ in conjunction with an already complex and rewarding poem, however again it is inhabited further by the humbling possibility that, where certitude is peripheral to our focus, the idea of God abides, embodied and sometimes breathing.

Broken Ground is a moving and tender paean for the universe; a soulful perambulation through memory’s timespaces. In Whitmanesque moments, Steve Armstrong celebrates the unique and often unsettling experiences that accompany contemporary peripeteia. Indeed, the uncanny and unfamiliar are embedded moments of self-absorption and forgetting in Armstrong’s first collection, foregrounding textured explorations of self-realisation and the ecological self.

The title, Broken Ground, is exceedingly clever in its multiple evocations and connotations. While ‘broken ground’ may refer to ruptured terrain as in Edgar Rice Burroughs, ‘There was nothing but rough, broken ground …’, it also references violence and human control in the way ground is broken for building or construction and in the way the term is a synonym for pioneering, which has associations with colonisation. But breaking ground can also be about new approaches and about reconciliation. These interpretations are foregrounded in the relationship between reality and divinity that pervades the work.

Steve Armstrong is an award-winning poet, and prior to this collection, perhaps best known for winning the 2015 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize with the poem, ‘A Cracked and Weathered Prayer’, which he famously stated was ten years in the making. Armstrong’s measured approach to the composition and publication of his poetry creates a slow burn in his poems, where time is impossibly elastic and memory is strong but often unreliable. His poems chart life’s most transformative experiences while simultaneously grieving the loss and spontaneity of youth. This is evident from the five section headings: ‘Substrate’, ‘Divination’, ‘One Thing’, ‘Still Life’ and ‘Giving What You Can’ where tenacity, patience and maturity are necessary to contextualise and ultimately celebrate lived experience. Importantly, in the face of transience, Armstrong’s poetry demonstrates that faith endures.

The epigraphs also form a vital part of this book. Indeed, lines from Matthew Dickman’s poem ‘Walking the Dogs’ sets the tone for the book and emphasizes that god is both present and absent: ‘all right, the thing that / is not God whispers to me … ’. In difficult times, memory can be a salve and close and quiet observation of the world is often restorative. Furthermore, there are two quotes from Seamus Heaney’s Nobel Prize Lecture from 1995 and others by Mark Tredinnick (one of Armstrong’s mentors), Nicolas Rothwell, C. Milosz, Rilke, Barry Lopez and Yuin Elder Uncle Max Dulumunmun Harrison, lending many of Armstrong’s poems a rich intertextuality. Most of the quotations refer to some kind of ordering principle; of trying to make sense of time passing. Significantly, walking and observation are two of the significant ways this happens in these poems. Whether in ‘Christmas Morning Walking Alone’, where ‘a thousand tiny globes, barely / lit save this overcast day’, or  in ‘Notations on a Spring Day’ where the narrator has ‘already … / walked the length of the beach, and body- / surfed the waves’ or in the command to ‘Set out alone at first light’ in ‘Dawn in the West McDonnell Ranges’, walking connects the inner and outer worlds and is where ecology and spirit meet. It can be urban walking in a Baudelairean sense or the steps of the non-Indigenous bushwalker.

In ‘Morning Walk to Aldi and Back’, Armstrong explores urban walking and a new breed of flaneurism. With the note that this poem is ‘after Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri’, this poem responds to the traveller’s pilgrimage; seeing things both spiritual and commercial. The quotidian element of walking to and from the supermarket is both familiar and humorous but, more importantly, creates a poignant reflection on routine. Here, the flaneur has an aim but is still absorbed in the sense of place; he is less of a drifter and more of a connected observer. Most importantly, the flaneur maps the city’s terrain and notes its intimacies:

Doves on a wire. A line of parked cars in the street, and the birds don’t miss. Magnolia glossy-green; Robinia turning yellow in the heat … … No shirt and stubbies. Elbows propped and gut slung behind a concrete fence. He lights a smoke … … … Daughter and grand-kids strapped in the new 4WD. A fine blue network of varicose veins.

In this poem, the emphasis is on the line. There is a line of birds on a wire, a line of parked cars, a fence and a ‘network of varicose veins’ in addition to the poem’s lineation and enjambments. This demonstrates the way everything is connected to everything else, illustrating Barry Commoner’s four 'laws of ecology'. Doves sitting high above the street are initially serene. However, their superior position on the wire is humorously undercut by the emphasis on them dropping faeces on the cars below them: ‘they don’t miss’. Furthermore, the recognisable stereotype of the overweight Australian with ‘no short and stubbies … gut slung … ’ is in equal parts comic and sad. In this way, the urban flaneur juxtaposes often duelling sentiments to create unexpected and memorable moments. The joy in living is most obviously evident in the beauty of the ‘Magnolia glossy-green; … Robinia turning yellow’ and the season’s cycles, but Armstrong reminds us that the most affecting is the ‘daughter / and grand-kids’. Even as they are ‘strapped into the new’ and vulgar ‘4WD’, we are reminded that children are the lifeblood of continuity.

‘Still Life’ is an aubade that incorporates the ordinary within extraordinary. As the narrator wakes and is becoming aware of his surroundings, a ‘long-running soap’ impinges on his senses and it is at this juncture he identifies as ‘a more discerning viewer’ and, in this regard, superior to his friends. While this could be interpreted as hubristic, the second stanza demonstrates the narrator’s intense gift for observation and connection to the environment. The poem seems to float on the page; using movement to interrogate the idea of ‘Still Life’ in an active environment. The play on the term ‘Still Life’ and the suggestion that it is oxymoronic emphasises the way art pins down the living in one still moment, while poetry sets it free:

Outside an ensemble

of magpies call down

the rain with the song; they climb and swoop,

on and off the beat

with my irregular

heart. The rain sounds on the metal roof,

makes a resonant humming in my bones.

On the screen behind my eyes,

there’s a black and white print: A dead bird

and a branch.

This unstill life.

Here, the poet revives the environment in an appeal to rhythm, imagery and form; even a dead bird is part of a rich, active ecology.

My favourite poem in this collection is ‘One Thing that Matters’ for its joyful evocation of a threshold. Armstrong has attempted a range of different kinds of poetic prose in Broken Ground but not all of them are as successful as this one. Indeed, ‘Next’ is a short story that doesn’t really belong in this collection. It feels cluttered and heavy where the lightness of touch in many of the other poems soar. In ‘One Thing That Matters’, the sense of becoming is thrilling as the prose leaps from ‘the crunch of white river pebbles under the car’ to ‘a drop of water, a full and glistening curve hanging perfectly at the tip of a frangipani leaf’. Scattered through the narrative are more ominous and humorous moments, including the lines ‘something is dying, and dying hard’ and ‘A reliable erection is a fantasy’. The poem ends with the haunting image of the boy ‘scooping up as many fish as he can hold in his arms’ and his desire to know them and, by extension, himself:

A boy of twelve running down a beach in California, where perfect slender bodies cover the sand. It’s not the naked beach goers of Bolinas who take his breath away—iridescent, fresh from the cold Humboldt current—it’s fish. A bay brimming with anchovies; a super-shoal migrating south. They don’t fight as they founder; it’s terrible to watch and at once irresistible. The boy runs the length of the darkened sand, and scoops up as many fish as he can hold in his arms. He wants to do something in recognition of their impossible number; and to know their still flashing and silvered beauty. Or maybe he’ll just bite off their heads.

Armstrong’s Broken Ground is full of exquisite moments expressed as contemporary Wordsworthian spot of times or Whitmanesque transcendentalism. Poems are arresting vignettes that turn on the meeting of the quotidian with the sublime; the monotonous with the exhilarating. In his glorious exploration of deep ecology and self-realisation Armstrong reminds us to ‘shut down the laptop’ and go walking, to ‘vivify … childhood’s unspoken blues’; to travel in an arc that’s / time—'.

Coach Fitz by Tom Lee begins with theory resting on a premise derived from the observations of the persona, also named Tom. Those impressions received and analysed by Tom the character underpin the narrative. Initially, I found this approach to novel writing to be a challenge, being more familiar with directly plunging the reader into mood and tempo. Coach Fitz is cool. The narrative glides.

Tom, a young man struggling to balance his enthusiasm for physical fitness with his self-consciousness, employs the services of an older woman as his running coach. A former psychoanalyst, Coach Fitz’s methods combine fitness training with an eccentric curiosity about the spirit of the place that she chooses as their running track. The pair run across Sydney’s parklands, streets and beaches. They swap opinions and a conversation emerges about the athletic body peppered with observations about architectural style and becoming an adult. Neither are socially adept.

The novel leads the reader through outdoor gyms, picnic spots and water towers; to internet cafés, hotel restaurants and bottle shops; with goat’s cheese, olive oil and sourdough bread. The body loves itself, its squats, stretches, run-ups, chin-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, warm-ups and ——.

Tom finds himself at once fascinated and troubled by his mentor’s peculiar ideas. His  attempt to develop his relationship with Coach Fitz flounders awkwardly, the scene well-crafted in a recognisable house in Annandale, Lilyfield or Rozelle. But this is not a novel about relationships. It’s about self-protection, the lone body with buffed skin enclosing finely tuned sinews and lovely bones. When Tom takes on a running partner of his own to replace the company he missed when Coach Fitz no longer ran with him, his emotional shortcomings don’t enhance his attempt to establish friendship or a credible student-teacher relationship.

Nick Mattiske of Insights magazine (UCA.org.au, sept 2018) writes:

Writing about the origins of the novel, Lee says that he is not being wholly critical of Sydney’s craze for fitness. In fact, the novel is an ‘expression of reverence’ for fitness. ‘Reverence’ is a deliberately religious word. There can be a level of religious devotion in physical exercise, with its community of believers, rituals, feelings of transcendence and attempts to live consistently well. It can be joyous and spiritually rewarding, but like the cultivation of mind and spirit there is a danger that it can turn inward, encourage self-obsession, become rigid and demanding and the arbiter of self-worth, and curb rather than enhance our interactions with others.

As a novel about the limitations of narcissism, Coach Fitz is successful. For to be so determined to build the body, to obsess about food, to indulge such pleasure in fetta and basil and drizzles of the finest olive oil over slices of perfectly ripened tomato on high quality sourdough, to love the car that is lived in, to choose the spare clothes of the athlete, the mirror is the judge that is not ever quite a friend. Inevitably the loneliness of self-engrossment endorses narcissism. The sanctuary of the bush shuffles shadows and sunlight, the beach sparkles, the sky above yawns, and the body is a beautiful stillness within the physical orb.

Is Tom zenlike, no greater than the flora, the copses and arbours, the sand and the sea under the vault of cobalt blue sky? Is Tom just another living creature, no more important than a microbe or an ant in the biodiverse scheme of nature? Or is he atomised, unable to connect with the life in the living environment,  too insensate to form relationships with other animate beings? Is he too fastidious about the bruschetta?

Coach Fitz is Tom Lee’s first novel. It is well crafted and well written. Directed by a sensitive film-maker with an eye for visual fiction that is linear – not punctuated by regular dramatic pitches but flat, occasionally lingering more or less wordlessly in the various Sydney settings – the narrative would likely reach a wider audience than the novel.

About the Author is Dead is a self-conscious book. Not in the sense of being painfully narcissistic or  reserved, but in its ever-present awareness of what Barthes called the 'tissue of citations' of which all writing is constructed. If the consensus is that we are now post-original, post-genius, post-inspiration, then what is left? The works of others.

These are sprawling, spacious poems, and Burton, who is also a visual artist, musician and animator, has a clear voice that shines through the layers of allusion, citation and inventiveness with form. The book features narratives, lyrics, erasure poems, Oulipo techniques and significant use of special characters.

The book is divided into two parts, 'About the Author' and 'The Author is Dead'. 'About the Author' opens with the three-page poem 'bodies breathe in by themselves'. The title makes no assumptions, beginning with the very basics of human existence and doesn't assume any particular subject or addressee. The poem makes use of non-standard poetic devices including check boxes as on a questionnaire, and a 'blinking' cursor. There is a clever paradox: 'no one can afford to breathe', and some of Burton's most characteristic writing:

even though I have no grand illusions I need Miranda July to read me my horoscope maybe my grand illusion is my lack of one

(5)

Back-tracking, name-dropping, questioning, searching, confessing, citing, this is how Burton works through her material. The irony that your citations may not be what you think they are, or what you want them to be, that you can never completely co-opt an allusion, is summed up in a humorous aside about Moe Tucker.

I heard that Moe Tucker was once a struggling single mom working at Walmart             I had five kids, I hadn't worked in a year and a half. Desperate wasn't          the word. I'm not a pushy person, but I leaped out of my seat screaming. I can't tell you how pissed I was. and I heard that Moe Tucker was a Tea Partier

(14)

The insights of post-structuralism are compelling but they do present creators with problems. Once the implications of textuality are laid out fully, authors run the risk of negating their own work from within the work. Taken to an extreme, we must agree that all understanding is an illusion, and communication, if it occurs, is random luck. If we don't have any hope of being understood as authors, then what am I doing right now? At the risk of being too earnest, Burton's 'meta' seems at times intrusive.

this page is not the this page this page is another page clogged

(9)

Okay, but what am I reading then? As with most of this kind of writing, a lightness of touch is essential. In 'archive fever', an otherwise engaging poem, there is a cheap post-structuralism

we are writing our retractions as we speak we are not who we say we are not we are not saying anything

(47)

Ultimately no signifier can ever be pure negation. It is simply not possible to not say anything.

Burton is at her best when her gentle irony shines through, for example in a parody of the opening lines of T.S. Eliot's famous Christian conversion poem 'Ash Wednesday':

we are both in this room feeling we are both in this room we are both feeling

(11)

In 'transaction' poignancy and humour combine.

'you are the best thing to happen to me' … he is instead in the throes of a decision that, yes, he will buy his own coffee plunger for the office. he is over having to wash it because the person who last used it was a slob 'why are people such slobs?' he thinks

(56)

Later in the poem a parody of academic life is juxtaposed with helping a child deal with the loss of a pet.

he is unaware he will never read

thomson using freud to introduce

derrida on heidegger on death

(57)

And the absurd juxtapositions of contemporary life are laid bare, the high and low, mingled under fluorescent lighting in front of motivational posters. Burton's work is a place where, as Bella Li suggests in her introduction, texts can separate, amalgamate, and recombine with each other to become 'new substances'.

Burton makes frequent use of non-standard textuality, including internet notation. The poem 'the future is but the obsolete in reverse', is a circular structure of words surrounding its title featuring a 'refresh' button in the bottom corner of the page. The poem 'machine made out of words' uses an Oulipo technique of letter substitution to generate several parodies of William Carlos Williams' famous lines about the scarlet woodcart.

a red whimper

bassoon

glazed with ramification

wattage

beside the white

chimeras

(34)

And that's not even the best one.

But the standout piece for me is 'flarfing ginsberg' with its hilarious line 'join facebook to start connecting with allen ginsberg'. Flarfing is a poetic technique using random internet search results and collaboration to produce outrageous or shocking material. Burton's flarf isn't vulgar or shocking, but deeply ironic, ending with the lines

overestimate the importance 'that's not an accurate quotation'

(53)

When Burton peels away some of the layers of tissue and writes simply, she can be powerfully moving, as in the quasi-traditional in subject and style, 'changing my perfume'.

Sleep helps you avoid everything wastelands to bossmen to magic tricking darkness in the stillest deep with Jesus and Buddha and royalty

(18)

Cordite Books, or the author, or whoever decided to add the extremely helpful notes at the end of the book, which detail some of Burton's methods and references, should be commended. They helped me avoid going to a screen for answers while immersed in this book.

About the Author is Dead is an expansive book, with wide space, in the text as well as the blank page, for the past and the future to intrude, invited or conjured by its citations, stories and dialogue. It adds a compelling layer of tissue.

The first horse poem I encountered was Browning’s 'How they Brought the Good news from Ghent to Aix'. Though the details of the narrative have dissipated over the years, the rhythm and intensity of the action and emotion has not. And if anything, the horror I felt at the brutal deaths of the two fallen horses caused by the ambition of humans, forgotten amongst the thrill for the rider of Roland and the clamouring relief of the townsfolk of Aix, has intensified.

I suspect that in a similar way I will carry images of Siobhan Hodge’s Justice for Romeo long after I have set the book aside. This is poetry that packs a political punch. It does so, not by overt proselytising, but by presenting imagist poetry that is enhanced by the portrayal of Romeo who is, as Hodge states in her preface, 'a symptom of all that is wrong with industrial scale equine production. He fell victim to human interests in as many ways as it was possible to fall.' Most importantly, the collection reverberates not just with a call for justice, but a call for the best of connections between horse and human.

The collection is divided into eight sections. The first of these, 'Autopsy', elevates the news we might garner from media reports from the Spring Racing Carnival to a poetic representation of the reality of the horse’s experience mediated as Hodge suggests by 'well-meaning ignorance' which she claims is 'as dangerous as malice' and, of relevance to this first section in particular, adds, 'Amongst horse people, this is often called love.'

The opening poem ironically titled 'Happy Valley Turnover', in six short verses of five lines of mostly three or four words, juxtaposes the pre-race diet 'American alfafa' and 'soybean starches' resulting in 'ulcered bellies', with details of the race, 'from stall to killing pen, now harried up the ramp'. The use of this sparse poetic form intensifies sense of distress of the horse’s journey and the emotional separateness of the racegoers.

Imported hay exchanged for spent bodies on the morning truck. Punters park elsewhere.

(3)

The sections are far reaching. Ekphrastic poems feature in the second section, 'The Orchard'. Hodge uses these to further her portrayal of human and horse interaction. In one of these, she draws on the work of George Stubbs, notable for his 18^th century paintings of horses as well as the extreme methods he used, 'Each jugular drained, veins puffed with molten wax' (15) to accurately portray the equine form. In using details from two of these paintings, Whistlejacket and Horse attacked by a Lion, Hodge ‘s poetry gains authority through historical cultural perspectives and the anatomical accuracy depicted.

You will know each close layer. Every private space must be nicked and noted.

(15)

As with details in the first section of Justice for Romeo, noting the divide between the racing crowd and the damaged horses, in this poem, Hodge uses the intimacy of viewing works of art in the final lines of 'Stubb’s' to highlight the separateness of humans from the brutality of the treatment of horses.

…                      No crowds at the scene, but each painting rolls stolen eyes.

(15)

In another of these poems, Hodge take a more distant historical view examining the depictions on ancient Greek vases, where, metaphorically perhaps,

… the frieze plaster has peeled across one flank and buttock open-book nicked stone feels parched as meat

(16)

Historical distance does not temper the poet’s revulsion at the treatment of these ancient horses

necks bulge with indignant whispers

(18)

Judicious use of descriptors such as 'traded plaster', 'teeth poised for battle', 'chipped hooves to strike', entice we readers into the artistry, while intensifying our revulsion at the risk to horses of performing for human entertainment.

A feature which I found persuasive was the self-deprecation of a poet clearly in love with the horse. Hodge succeeds with this ploy in poetic terms as well as in, at least this reader’s, response. In the sequence 'Bone Binds', the medical epigraph provides a warning that 'the horse is a potentially lethal animal' (41).

Although the narrative relaying the narrator’s falls, in these three poems is disturbing, there is a reassuring tenderness in the portrayal of the father figure and security in his strength and their relationship. It is in the third poem 'Gina' where we encounter the poet/narrator recounting her responsibility for not accepting the horse’s lead and then finding herself dumped with

no cushion for arrogance dropped to sand and gutted trees.

The poet admits the horse cannot be blamed.

….      I made my own way home, and still can’t fault the terms for severance

(43)

We re-meet Gina in 'For Gina', along with 'Rinjani' in the final two poems of the collection. It is a powerful way to end a collection which compels us to consider a less anthropocentric attitude to the horse.

In 'Rinjani' Hodge brings us the most tender of images

Your tongue, flat and soft, took my fingers … …                You took my taste and turned each whisker over arm, face, neck.

(76)

Perhaps only a writer such as Siobhan Hodge whose poetry has evolved alongside her deep personal connection with horses could produce such a captivating and convincing collection. Artful use of technique, a sparse poetic style and razor-like approach in presenting historical and contemporary evidence are reasons readers will be drawn to delve into Justice for Romeo. Siobhan Hodge has taken our hand, left the smallest print and reminded us that we need to relate to the equine species on its own terms.

Taking my hand you left the smallest print, but I may touch on your terms only.

(76)

Jeltje Fanoy's book is a book of contrasting experiences. There is great happiness in here, from the beautiful cover photo through to the CD of music and sound poems in the back of the book. A variation of the cover photo is repeated inside in which the bird flies into the hand and it also flies away. This sense of the fleetingness of experience, the comings and goings, the gains and losses is one of the enduring themes of this collection.

The happiness that comes is no superficial happiness; rather it is a kind of life joy that arises from surviving tough experiences. These experiences such as migrating to Australia in the 1960s and as Jeltje says in the second poem

Daydreams about wiry, yet-to-be-befriended class mates

Her sidekick to loneliness among other children, presumably mostly Anglo-Australians, is an acknowledgement of a child's sense of 'unbelonging' without the inevitability of falling in to despair. Time and again in the poems there is a sense of being left out, of the weather not being the way it should be, or a sudden perception of displacement.

Her diptych poem 'Mirror image' shows that experience in the shape of the poems and the last three lines:

Them...took...us...from...to         To...from...us...took...them Them to                                                                       To them Took from                                                                From took Us                                                                                          Us

The taking from continues to this day and this last stanza of four in this visual poem makes the experience visceral.  Jeltje Fanoy's words draw a stark line around the current government's asylum seeker policy.

The visual keeps appearing. In 'disappearing world' the jigsaws don't quite work

in a disappearing world we lay our jigsaws, retrieve pieces that are missing, some break off, fall from the edge, we re-imagine them at night, clutching at straws, hoping they'll turn up out of the darkness, we have pens by our bedside, we have books with blank pages, just in case, for the missing piece, the one that melted away after a glass of wine, the one we always miss in recounts of all the pieces, the one that slipped away, shines brightly in another person's jigsaw (the shape is right, but the details are all wrong!)

Jeltje's poems are also full of movement, leaving the house, catching a train or a tram, flying free, riding a bicycle, swimming and driving. These are poems going places, acutely observing everything as she passes through (at whatever speed).

But then the walls come up, whether it is the increasingly armed inspectors on public transport, the barriers between people as well as the walls of hatred, derision and condescension. There are battles to be waged against the world, external ones cars that blow exhaust fumes at pedestrians, and internal ones when feeling trapped.

th language hurts it's a form of torture, it's a form of torture painted into a corner   not letting go   its a form of torture without a name   and holding on   not letting anyone down      th

Poems about her parents' memories of World War Two appear late in the book with improvisations of living. She writes:

Waiting for my mother after World War Two I taught myself to walk/fall/walk

It's this resilience that shines through the poems, as well as through the land, the birds, trees, beaches and the Merri Creek where John Batman made a treaty with the people of the Kulin nation.

Flying into the Hands of Strangers is a collection of poems with political resonances, but they are also playful. They would make a wonderful resource in schools because of their different forms and poetic method, it would send the message that poems are about real life. A serious message embedded in joyful existence. Read and listen to her poems.

Cassandra O’Loughlin classifies her collection of poems as 'Ecopoems' and she gives the following definition of ecopoetry:

a relatively new term for describing contemporary poetry that has a strong ecological emphasis and an ecocentric perspective. It moves beyond the scope of ‘landscape’ and ‘nature’ poetry. While precise definitions vary, ecopoetry implies responsibility for the environment. It is concerned with preserving the stability and integrity of the natural world. Ecopoetry is a positive affirmation of our embeddedness in ecological relationships.

Belonging is the chief concern of these poems: belonging to country and to an extended family with early-settler ancestors. O’Loughlin’s lived experience of the Hunter River region of NSW is a recurring theme. Rivers, in all their seasons (and the rivers that run through us) are depicted with vivid imagery. Tied up with this geography are memories of special familial relationships: a grandmother, a mother, a sister / friend, a daughter and (possibly) grandchildren. An outstanding example of where the two streams of belonging converge is the poem, 'Floods'.

'Floods' is typical of O’Loughlin’s poems where a visit to, or drive through, particular terrain triggers personal memories and historic imaginings such as when antipodean days were 'sunny as peeled corn' (23) and an immigrant ancestor gathered 'her clan around the starched white cloth of discipline' (24).

O’Loughlin not only closely observes traits of geography, but she looks for, and finds, herself.  The

 ... flash-flooded fields and a diary awash bail-high

remind her of 

... other floods that have poulticed this earth’s ailing chest.

and then

… to a raft of women who have voyaged down ... to the ebb and flow of their destinies.

'I belong to this tribe', she writes. (23–24)

The rich imagery of rivers is used to great effect to describe the subject of 'River Guide'. In this prose poem, O’Loughlin paints an authentic picture of a man shaped, and inhabited, by his environment:

        The man’s trousers, rolled at the hem as if prepared for wading, and his shirt, are the white-grey cloud colour of the naked gums, his boots, brown-black like the bark, and chipped.

Water brims the banks of the man’s eyes.

(54–55)

One of the best prose poems in the collection is 'Nourishment'; a delightful rendering of a quirky event witnessed on a train. It satisfies all of Jordie Albiston’s criteria for good prose poetry: unity within brevity, poetic quality, sustained intensity, contracted emotion and compactness.[1]

'South of Birubi on Newcastle Bight' is full of inventive compound words and 'liquid language' used to describe a visit to a shantytown on the beach where 'the ocean spills its long syllable'.  A woman is scaling fish by a beach shack:

It’s mullet-coloured, makeshift, with a low-hipped lean-to

(25)

In the final stanzas, the first person persona becomes the subject. This is a common pattern in O’Loughlin’s poems. Here, the ‘I’ senses:

… a lifetime is creeping up behind me

(26)

And among rock pools, 'my name is uttered' (27).

The poem, 'To Paint the Day', is written entirely in the third person and benefits from the distance that is created from the subject. The warm, sacred tone of a woman lovingly attempting to paint 'a pelican coasting' onto 'a tidal glimmer on the lake' (56) is maintained as she is interrupted by a boy, as loved and regarded as her environment and her efforts to represent it. In this poem, O’Loughlin achieves both unity and clarity.

Apart from the fine sestina, 'The Room and the Tree', about a grandmother and grandchild (inspired by Elizabeth Bishop’s sestina on the same theme), the poems are free verse or prose poetry. There are a wide variety of forms on the page, both line length and stanza length and, on the whole, they are well-chosen: 'Floods' is in couplets, 'Luminescence' in quatrains, 'Yesterday' in quintains with a final monochord and 'Enduring Things' has eight line stanzas. Some of the longer poems have no such regularity.

In 'Muloobinbah', the varying line lengths, the spaces between the words and their placing, reflect the poem’s grave theme of displacement of the original inhabitants:

Home is not only a miamia or a house, an address where someone                 waits for news of a loved one, but a

time –

(31)

'Driving Inland', a poem in 7 sections, tells of a car trip from beyond the Blue Mountains to the Adelaide Hills. It is introduced by an epigraph of lines from Rainer Maria Rilke on the nature of success. This theme is explored further in conversation with a male passenger. However, as the journey penetrates further inland, conversation gives way to introspection.

True to the ecopoetic genre, section iv of 'Driving Inland' contains an imagining of what it might be like to be other-than-human: in this case, an endangered plains wanderer (15).

O’Loughlin is an observant poet with a gift for imaginative language and a solid repertoire of poetic devices. She writes with a knowledge of, and feel for, the natural history and settlement of regional Australia, particularly from a female perspective. However, at this precarious time of threat to our planetary life-support systems, I hungered for lines that were more unsettling than the wistful tone typified by: 'Perhaps this land wants its ancient self back' (52).

 

Concerning a Farm, a collection of fifty eight, mainly short, free verse poems, is a pocket sized volume, but shows large ambition and breadth. It is the third book published by Robert Wood, the Western Australian poet whose previous publications are History & the Poet: Essays on Australian Poetry, and Land Mass, a hundred page poetic history of Australia.

The title, Concerning a Farm, is explained by Wood in his section of the book, A Note on the Text. He states that his writing involves, ‘not only a poetry of place, but also the cultivation of ground that allows experiments to flower’ (100). Each poem has either a site (for example, Yosemite), town, city, state, country or continent referenced, and there is one lengthy work to finish, ‘unexplored like heart’ about the world. Most of the places – some of which, the author acknowledges he hasn’t visited – are familiar ones but there are also lesser known Australian towns and suburbs included. Most of the places are urban areas. The methodology behind the creation of the poems is a constrained one, as in much of contemporary poetics. Wood notes that he researched poems that mentioned each featured place – either in ‘real, imagined or discursive terms’ (100) – and then selected words and lines, from those works for his poems. From this ‘compost’ he ‘could turn over the soil, plant seeds, watch seeds grow’ (100). As to be expected, such a freshness of style will challenge readers regarding syntax, lack of narrative and juxtaposition. But, also to be expected, individual lines and sections, from such a rich reserve, are often striking and memorable.

Ecology and history are themes throughout the collection. Birds, other animals, water and trees are common motifs. The front cover illustration of the text is Crayfish by Watanabe Shōtei, crayfish being species that are very intolerant of pollution and other human-generated fouling of their environment. In terms of history, colonialism, in particular, seems of interest to Wood.        

A few of the poems are overtly about the current predicament of the earth’s climate. ‘Unexplored like heart’ concludes with the lines, ‘for we were born with it / for we owe it / and you were there holding out your hands’ (98). ‘Rarely feverish the shadows of a tunnel’ about Patagonia contains the unequivocal lines, ‘seeing the end of the world upright / happening and heating ... a debt to the dark officials / the priests of wreckage / the air sewage’ (67). The last line of this poem, ‘you heard the paint thrashing’ (68) is a stunning allusion to development. Wood’s judicious use of personal pronouns is important in making these pieces  meaningful – either when talking about humanity as a whole, or an individual, ‘we’ and ‘you’ are implicated in these scenarios.

The effect of development on the human population and on the environment is shown in several of the works. The world’s fourteenth most densely inhabited city, Delhi, which regularly has water shortages, is referenced in ‘the populace of composition’ – ‘Chant the water / ripen the water ... decant the water ... with the warm luxuries of / the marble water / the ivory water’ (69–70). ‘The madness of no parting’, about the Gold Coast, contains the lines, ‘the clarity we want / to relax from this misery glint of ourness,’ (34). These lines work on the level of a conflicted relationship as well as seeming to refer to being captive to over-development, the light ‘glinting’ off the high rise. In ‘blue shelter’, in relation to Brisbane, after references to the penal settlement of the city’s origins, the last line alludes to human settlement encroaching on the environs – ‘shrinking / in the surround sound where the poison reaches now’ (40). ‘Palms the come out’, regarding Paris, references the early habitat of that city – ‘the creek spotted with leopard, unencumbered by / stone / locks’ (53). ‘Gold start’, concerning Phuket, contains few words but effectively outlines the effect of development on the environs and native species, as in, ‘goodbye past / past buffalo’ (84).

The impact of an introduced species to an ecological system is also covered in the text. ‘Shallow restlessness whingeing for pleasure’, regarding Sydney, mentions curlews, ibises and magpies, but the most potent verse includes the lines: ‘mynahs / appetites lifted onto heights, flash / bright, wingtipped, you want to break / the whole pacific’ (19). These birds have been categorised as the third-most-invasive species in the world, this characteristic likely due to the alteration of habitat that occurs with human urbanisation.

Some of the poems incorporate ecology with history, in detailing experiences of the Indigenous populations of Australia and New Zealand. The poem, ‘blue as kite’, on the subject of Auckland, includes the lines ‘the imagination of invasion standing ... eye to eye in the line of sand / that we drew for them’ (22, 24). Cultural destruction is referred to in ‘stranger uncle’, about Cherbourg, an Aboriginal settlement in New South Wales. At Cherbourg, different cultural groups were forced to live together, each having to abandon their own language and learn English. The last stanza: ‘maddened hopping / misery punishing, / weary wisps / pushed white, death exposure / end yes’ (31–32) is devastatingly effective. In ‘steadfast corporate minstrels we know the delay’, about Australia as a whole, Wood assembles a comprehensive suite of verses covering the first white settlers, their impact on the Indigenous population and the effect of permanent populations' expansion on the environs. The following lines carry much weight – ‘swaddle the hessian ... iron the blue tortoise and tar into the tall grass ... perilous the dreaming ... cradle the betrayal and pure the what’ (44, 48).

Wood is adept at using several poetic devices. There are stunning similes, such as in ‘green upland detail’, when describing river fowl on The Hawkesbury – ‘damp they chuckle / at threads for / mudflats meridian / translucent as the morning of howling life’ (16) and in ‘paperwork range’ about Cape Town – ‘peaceful as the slow war’ (25). In ‘eternity asked of the tall’, regarding Yogyakarta, ‘planeload / of pinkness’ (64) is a perfect combination of alliteration and metaphor. And there is much musicality in the poems because of the constant use of assonance, as shown in the title, ‘suitable blue’ in reference to Mecca.

If you care at all about Australian flora and fauna, justice for Aboriginal peoples, and a future for the generations to come, Adani will be a word that invokes many emotions, none of them positive. Personally, the name Adani makes me bl**dy angry, and it should you as well. Not simply because their proposed mega-mine will help doom future generations to a catastrophically warmed planet, not just because it is another example of carbon colonialism, but that it also shows how wedded politics is to neo-liberalism and extractivism in this country. Democracy is buggered. Or as David Ritter expresses it, the whole thing is a ‘piss take.’

The Coal Truth is an excellent book, in its depth and breadth. It begins with a prologue by Adrian Burragubba, Wangan and Jagalingou elder, artist, and 2017 Bob Brown environmentalist of the year. He has been at the centre of a long standing legal case against Adani on behalf of his people (at the time of writing, Adani’s lawyers may face misconduct charges). The battle has not simply been against a mining giant, but against the Queensland Government. Native Title can be extinguished when it suits the government - a simple extension of colonialism in the name of carbon emissions and profits for the rich. Burragubba reminds us of Aboriginal connection to land, and how the proposed mine continues over two centuries of colonialism, violence, and dispossession.

The main section of the book is in two parts. The first part is quasi-autobiographical, as David RItter describes his settling in Sydney, and part of his career with Greenpeace that intersects with big coal in Australia. Ritter describes the tension of life in the middle class; how do you have casual conversations about the end of the world with your friends? The first part of the book also charts the history of resistance against Adani and big coal in general, as well as its political support – nay the lackey-like nature of Australian politicians to some rich, and somewhat corrupt, Indian coal magnate. Such resistance begins with the defence of Bimblebox Nature Reserve from Waratah Coal by Paola Cassoni. From Paola we learn about the value of place. Simply trashing one site (Bimblebox) with a coal mine but agreeing to protect another ‘similar area’  is not an equivalence; not environmentally, ethically, or psychologically.

Chapter 3 skewers any idea that coal mining is good for people and the economy, cataloguing the impacts of fly-in fly-out (FIFO) workers on local economies and the lives of miners themselves, the scourge of black lung disease, and tax avoidance by mining companies. Chapters 4 and 5 examine conservative politics, beginning with the backward steps of John Howard. However, Labor doesn’t get off either, with Ritter highlighting royalty holidays and water rights promised by the QLD government. And of course both sides form a revolving door with the mining industry. The chapter on the Great Barrier Reef is sobering. I’m sure many of us have GBR visit stories. Mine at age seven helped launch my career in science, albeit not as a marine biologist as I initially dreamt.

Part 2 is shorter, but opens up the story to different voices. Many of you will be familiar with Lesley Hughes, Will Steffen, and David Alexander from various Climate Councils (need I remind you crowdfunded after being defunded by the LNP). Their short, sharp summary of the science reminds us that Adani would produce 1.3 times our annual carbon emissions. Hilary Bambrick points out that there is no mention of coal in our National Clean Air Agreement, while coal pollution kills Australians now. The low quality coal from the Galilee Basin will also kill Indians when Adani burns it in their power stations. John Quiggin shows that the whole development is really economically unviable. Glencorp’s recent announcement of a cap on coal demonstrates that coal is becoming a stranded asset.

Of most interest to me was Ruchira Talukdar’s takedown of any suggestion our coal exports to India are humanitarian in nature. To be sure, there is an urgent need for more Indians to be connected to electricity. However, coal-driven development has been uneven, and electricity connection follows the money, such that those who live in coal rich areas are the ones who remain unconnected from the grid! Neoliberalism has resulted in the privatisation of electricity production, resulting in privileges for companies like Adani, and ecological degradation and social disruption for everyone else. Anti-coal movements have achieved the end of coal mining in some communities. Talukdar sees strong parallels between the struggles for land against mining by indigenous communities in both countries.

The Coal Truth tells the whole truth about the piss take that is coal politics in this country. Any environmentalist, activist, poet, philosopher, or theologian who has an interest in the end of coal in this country should read this book. It is a sober, concerning, thought provoking, anger invoking, inspiring account of the situation we now face, and the glimmer of hope we have.

The fundamental character of dwelling [is] … sparing and preserving.

– Martin Heidegger [i]

Keri Glastonbury’s Newcastle Sonnets as a bricolaged 'recombinant poetics of place' (81) is a praiseworthy tribute to post-industrial Newcastle. Newcastle’s old DNA has been re-combined into new poetic sequences. This collection is a poetics of place where the East End of Newcastle replicates the East Village of New York – blinding with place names and people. 'The city’s lazily retooled past lives' (3) reawaken through an evolving and quirky tale of two cities that both spares and preserves the past, while breathing vitality into the here-and-now.  Glastonbury marks-up 'A history of gay bars / jumping up against biker bars / in the middle of the genre' (8). While 'watching a time-lapse video of Newcastle harbour' is like 'a symphony of the city' (24) she notes there are 'statistically more artists than miners' (69) in the Newcastle sonnet-scape.

Jean Paul Sartre wrote that 'for the poet, language is a structure of the external world'.[ii] Glastonbury, by structuring the worded-place-space in its classic 'chiaroscuro / of coal dust & sand' (31) fuses neoteric images of 'a straightedge punk / food-blogging his morning eggs benedict' with philosophical references to 'object-oriented-ontology' (11). The collection of allusions embraces the geospace of Newcastle. If one wonders how the girl whose 'father coined a word – solastalgia' (77) found its way into a poem, you would find that her father was an Associate Professor at, yes – the University of Newcastle. No feelings of homesickness when one is not at ‘home’ for Glastonbury. Her home-town-work is a granular, subversive ‘soliphilia.’ The allusions, from Rick Owen sneakers and a Sea Shepherd t-shirt (21), to (Stockton’s Olympic medallist) Justin Norris (21) and the trivial, 'At trivia at the G' (19), suture disparate and incongruent details into a warm and egalitarian series of cubist overlaps of altered and diverse perspectives.

Just as the cubists crossed the line between the viewer and the viewed, or the mind which conceives something and the thing which is conceived, cubist forms challenged the viewer’s preconceptions of what it means to look upon and possess an image.  In some senses, the mind which views and that which it views, is in Merleau-Pontian terms one, because the artist (poet) instils a part of herself in the art (poem) and sees herself in that which she creates. The represented subjects/places of Glastonbury’s poems are not immediately available for possession as the effects of her vitalistic movement and temporality prevent the viewer/reader from objectifying the image/language as though it were a passive object/scene. These places become for the poet her temporal-personal poetry of place and experience. For example, 'Who Killed Bambi?' (77) may well have been figuratively image-scripted by the equally transgressive Claude Cahun, who asks not to be kissed as s/he is in training. The poem bespatters references to pylon signs, the Sutherland Shire train and 'families struggling to describe / a genre that we know as reality' (77). It finishes with 'venison with Michael Leunig, / in a local hatted restaurant' (77). Now we know the answer to who killed Bambi. Perhaps.

Keri Glastonbury, Newcastle’s demiurge – creatively retools the present in the form of a radically retooled sonnet. I hardly recognised the form but it’s there – deconstructed and reconstructed much like the city itself. Always only fourteen lines – fourteen unique units which help us work out 'how people might navigate a city' (27) and where 'Some people build theirs / with literature / & poetry, / watching the coal ships kedge by' (26). Much like jazz, which retains its essential character no matter what influences it absorbs, Glastonbury’s sonnets become greater than the sum of their individual parts as recursive motifs braid the seventy-eight poems across the Newcastle city-scape. A scrabble board of street names intersect goods trains, movie stars and politicians, pubs and universities, academics and the BLF – nothing escapes her poetically quippy one-line marginal notes.

Glastonbury builds word scenes around forenames, surnames, nicknames – peopling a bricolaged tangle of re-combinations – improvising and ensnaring what small objects and scenes fall to her gathering eye. In multisensorial ways, as she assembles place as 'driving over Styx Creek, appropriately / laden with heavy metal' (3), she throws her eye further, to a scene where 'parents are waddling their kids to school / – it could be the East Village' (3) and the details of  'the post-industrial / as an in situ conceit' (2) become 'Linda Ronstadt[s]: "You’re No Good”' (8), the ultimate remake hit.

The poet’s affiliation with the natural world – as dwelling place – is never remote. Her thickly textured, sensuous local knowledge brings agency to place, as Islington Park takes form where 'I hung out with Stella in Islington Park / yesterday & all the kids / were climbing over the felled gums' (39) as 'the Islington figs release the bats & the sky / blacks out like an erasure poem' (43.). Likewise, 'As the white whale Migaloo / (with hardly a barnacle on him) sneaks past' (15) and 'Merewether was lousy with dolphin' (16) we find to our great delight 'the beaches / are overexposed / & underdeveloped' (1) but in the course of another time and place 'The sea was angry that day ... ' (19).

The flux of the city’s transformation is uncovered in a series of vignettes through the collaged effect of subject matter recursively braiding each fragment together. Glastonbury’s work is a process and in her self-reflexive preoccupation with her own perceptions of things she renders Newcastle’s world as a continuing evolution. The responsiveness of Keri Glastonbury’s poetry lies in casting off rusty images of an industrial environment for an urbane reflection of the 'correspondences between emotional terrains and the ways language and story respond to represent people who are embedded within the environment. [Hers] is at once a bioregional biography and a geography of affect.' [iii]

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[i] Heidegger, M 1975, trans Albert Hofstadter, Poetry, Language, Thought, HarperPerennial, New York, p. 147. [ii] Sartre, J-P 1988, What is Literature? And Other Essays, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, p.30. [iii] Bristow, T 2105, The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place, Palgrave Macmillan, UK, p.79.

Thriveni C Mysore

Differentiating between the philosopher and the poet, defining poetry, George Santayana says that

the philosopher in his best moments is a poet, while ‘the poet has his worst moments when he succeeds in being a philosopher.

Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm’s-length … The first element which the intellect rejects in forming its ideas of things is the emotion which accompanies the perception; and this emotion is the first thing the poet restores. He stops at the image, because he stops to enjoy … Poetry takes every present passion and every private dream in turn for the core of the universe.’ (in Mais 1921, 71–72)

The poetry of Philip Neilsen in his sixth collection, Wildlife of Berlin, confirms the above definition. The poet restores emotion, reconnects the reader’s senses to Nature, reconnects the human world’s disillusioned senses to Nature, and reconnects humanity to humanity.

Wildlife of Berlin is not about gradient ecosystem or the flora and fauna of Berlin, it is about human sensibilities. It is all as said in the poem, Marienplatz – Munich: ‘exclamation marks without a sentence’. (12)

It is astounding to read the lines:

the old collaborator launched lawyers

at those who copied his design,

though even this Bavarian sky

is a forgery from the east.

(12)

The depth in reading about the Museum of Hunting ‘studded with antlers and heads, the floors patrolled by brown bears, wolves and a lynx, their Waldgeist stolen by some taxidermist’ is profound with many tangential meanings, political and otherwise. It ends with razor-sharp words, ‘no regrets’.

Concerning the second poem in the Wildlife of Berlin, the poet’s ‘Notes’ speak about the atrocities at the end of World War II. It is a brutal, in-human and a very wild chapter in the history of humankind. The poem begins slowly:

The documentary tracks badgers, follows foxes

in their mellow tunnels and silver dawns,

the delicate relocation of a bee swarm,

the nattering flutter

of squirrels, bats and swifts.

(14)

Unmistakable badgers, foxes, tunnels, silver dawns, bee swarm, squirrels, bats and swifts carefully keeps the poet’s mind within silken folds and that itself is poetic genius. It is not simply a tendency towards expressing the impossible, it flows unerringly as:

Like a compliant snow drift, white swans break and bunch

under a humped bridge. The voice-over confides with a chuckle that

‘the authorities turn a blind eye to Berliners feeding bread to the swans’

as they might have done to women

who hoarded bread, or rope to hang themselves

(14)

‘There is no seasonal triumph of nature to see’, says the poet ending the poem poignantly:

except children sifting rubble for scraps of pigweed

or boiling bark for tea.

(14)

A poem, so abruptly landing on all fours startles the reader. Helplessness and guilty shame become the punctuation here and the poet’s thoughts are driven home successfully.

Quoting Denever Holt: ‘If climate change results in habitat changes and it effects the lemmings, it will show up in the snowy owls because 90 percent of their diet is lemmings. The owls are the key to everything else’, the poet picks up, ‘Snowy Owl’ with deliberate observation:

You know everything

white face of the world

even in flight you see a fox’s whiskers

can hear a mouse twitch

three feet under snow

so what a cacophony we must be

even on days when we catch ourselves

and try to stay still.

(31)

The poet’s warning of near fatality through careless humans is unforced. Nothing at all can ever reverse the changes in Nature brought about by human actions. No satellites, forecasts, warnings, mappings can stop the ice from melting. It is more of ‘mass sacrifice’ than the poet’s ‘mass suicide’. The remedies suggested are tragic and truthful:

Homecoming, dark specks tracked from above,

rodent and human mingled

in the Arctic melt.

Unless, though snow blind,

we too can be stealthy,

alert as a mouse’s eye.

(31)

This dignified flow continues to pick up pace in the poem, ‘Auspices’:

Our skies are less auspicious now,

we glance up as heaven slips away

resist the earth pull

try to knit patterns of escape,

clay terrestrials

bullied by the unknown.

(32)

The poet spreads out the chess-board in front of the reader giving all the time in the world to think about the next move. The efficiency of the poem now is judged not by word play, but by its ability to sort out essential from unessential, to infer, to discriminate, to weigh, and then apply to the situation in hand. The anxious poet says:

If only a million wings could filter

the sun, cool the ocean currents,

soothe the space dome,

that mad cracked cap.

The geese have their own prediction.

(32)

Increase in UV radiation, global rise in temperature, ozone tear, confused migratory birds, nearing extinction of species of birds and animals is said without hesitation and it is this power of true conviction that urges the reader to recognise the present rough-shod eco-situation. Blurting out the list of problems is not itself a solution, it has to be sought out. The repercussions of our actions are reflected to infinity and scattered in each degree of rotational motion of Earth. Strangely enough, it is among these renditions – like poems – that truth manifests. Tenderness and Pity combine in equal proportions bringing out a rare poetic quality of hurried correction in Neilsen’s poetry. The poem, ‘Tawny Frogmouth’, portrays ghastly complexities of human action towards the once balanced ecosystem:

Introverted cousin of the owl,

one part existentialist

one part backyard Buddha

meditates until it

becomes the branch, the mottled bark.

(34)

As it calls for a mate through stationary nights of August, the poet says it was unsuccessful the previous year pointing to the dwindling populace and it is with sad response that a reader faces these lines:

Last year you called until October

but no one came, plunging our house

into pathos. You offered a lifetime of fidelity

and even that was not enough.

So intent on blending in,

camouflage too perfect, or too rough,

a heart and lung of twigs.

(34)

Shining real in poetic form, the poem ends by playing on haunting loss in high pitch giving much intensity to pathos, pointing out yet again the roughness of heart and lung figuratively compared to twigs.

The poet re-enters again with another haunting poetic melody with ‘Pied Currawong’. Never giving a chance for the reader to sit in the vacant seat by his soulful side, the poet picks-up a handful of tincture:

The poster bird for evolution

clatters on a tin roof of dawn,

narrates from the bony blue gum.

It is a story about the 1960s in Sydney,

how it learned to pierce

milk bottle tops and siphon the cream.

(35)

It is with horrid significance that the poem ends:

the birds learn new tricks

having foreseen our absence.

(35)

It is the reader who bears the weight of these words about the gone glass of protection, breeding of flotilla of plastic and the spoiling of ocean, the poet’s words chill the spine and the point is made with clinical precision. A thought crosses the reader’s mind, ‘our absence; From? How?’

The poem, ‘Noisy Miner’ helps us to understand Nature in all political correctness:

Anthropocentric miner has vulgar manners,

always insists on the right of way. Known by

the first people as cobaygin, then chattering bee-eater,

the noisy miner, black hooded,

gang loaded, is a pragmatist.

(38)

When such ‘miners’ – honey eaters – drive away Silvereyes, Sparrows, Finches, ‘Colonisation is its pulse’ strikes a note with the impeccable sharpness of UHF note, but then:

It looks into a rain puddle,

pecks at the yellow eyes and beak,

trusts in belligerence to bully death,

the hunched fur, over there under grevillea.

(38)

The poet cuts through general circumstances, yet, says something else. Again the reverberations of survival, death, hunch, belligerence, colonisation, anthropocentric miner … continue to stay in the mind of the reader.

‘Superb Fairy Wren’ stretches in action without busy-ness, ‘The Eastern Whipbird’ stares at nothingness, the first painted bird, ‘The new Holland Honeyeater’ is dizzy with fructose:

Dizzy with fructose he has a vision,

of sweet spinning, bush to bush,

feathered, territorial, monogamous,

which cleanses him of the gun powder,

blood and shit of his military days.

(41)

The soulful poem re-paints the challenge in the joy of being.

‘Red-capped Robin – Long Pocket, Indooroopilly’ begins with something as commonplace as ‘parking cars’, but progresses meaningfully creating magic, thrill and a sense of beauty in the reader not forgetting to leave a taste of sympathy, ugliness of human tendencies and peculiar pain somewhere down the guts. After all, sadness underlines happiness, always fading-in later than never. If that surety sinks in, then the phantom of inconsistency never crosses the reader’s mind, but to evoke such a resolute emotion, there needs tranquil dignity and responsibility on the poet’s part and that is skillfully taken care of by Neilsen in Wildlife of Berlin.

‘Queensland Haiku’ says:

Salted earth kills crops:

pig-headed, we tell this sharper sun

to make fruit from dust.

(93)

Polluted earth that has turned the all-essential soil to some sort of by-product of acid has stopped her support to human life subtly. It is her way of protesting. The unfavourable green life is linked to all climatic changes, the ruptured zones, melting ice and forest fires, too. Unfortunately the invisible chain link of Nature is unseen by insensitive human eyes. The dumbness of human life is exposed by the poetic words, ‘to make fruit from dust’. This pig-headedness is as clear as a stone-tablet written in bold letters, yet apathy sneaks into human tendency to notice it. Such poetic fluorescence is again seen in the poem, ‘The Dead are Bored’:

We the dead are bored with your concerns,

your endless talk on social media about food and pets,

…

Listen, there is not magic in this prophecy:

when the rhino is gone

and clumsy birds mop the plains

you will see there your own remains.

(94)

The poetry in Wildlife of Berlin thus flows deeply, disturbing the imaginary peace of mind in an engaging way, making one murmur in sympathy. Freshness of approach in poetic devices, too, makes a coherent impression on the reader, to keep one’s opinion aside and to go with the poetic flow of thoughts at once. Such effect can be made possible only when the poet is true to his feelings and Philip Neilsen compels any reviewer to congratulate the poet first and then move on with any other observations.

Wildlife of Berlin has depth, sanity and distinct perfection. The half-learned world often amused by imaginative apathy rudely awakens to Neilsen’s poetry, for each poem in the anthology reaches a serene height of detached interest and completes itself, quenching poetic thirst.

Former editor of Kokako, New Zealand's only haiku magazine, Owen Bullock has published previous collections of haiku, including wild camomile (Post Pressed, Australia, 2009) and breakfast with epiphanies (Oceanbooks, NZ, 2012). The title of his fourth collection of haiku, River’s Edge, suggests a journey, either embarking or returning; anticipation and apprehension. It evokes beginnings and endings. The haiku of Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho; (1644-1694) comes to mind, his extensive travel and his mortality poems.

There is stillness and quiet solitude in many of Bullock’s haiku. The gentle rhythms move from contemplation of the lives of elderly people in his care to observations of nature, where the two subjects often interact:

his voice younger as he talks about his wife

(4)

silence after the wave breaks silence

(9)

This interaction demonstrates the Japanese belief that humankind is not only part of nature, but that the two are one.

Using the themes of journey and personal memory, the haiku in this collection explore the depths of the self, the inspiration of the natural world, melancholy and transience. The following haiku demonstrate these themes.

nodding to her story as if for the first time

(6)

stillness after rain a river of sky

(31)

from his taxi the loneliness of night

(65)

meditation I let go what I lost

(50)

Owen Bullock’s haiku use imagery and memory to unlock the voices of the elderly. The tone and atmosphere of his poems create vivid moments of human emotion. The journey is of the everyday, of the lives of people and their engagement with nature. Bullock’s observations pay homage to the people in his care.

old notebook his daughter’s recipe

(23)

His poetry demonstrates insight, respect and compassion without sentimentality. The haiku speak of the impermanence of life reflecting the theme of transience in classical Japanese literature.

Other poems in this collection celebrate the sea, the land. And always, the river, the edge. They go beneath the surface leading the reader toward appreciation of nature and life.

dusk birdsong pulls you closer

(67)

Zoë Sadokierski has not just designed cover page for 20 Poets, she has effectively made a creative statement of the subject, of what to expect, of how to approach the subject and of new age vehemence, of communicating ideas beyond words.

During the last decade, changes in the poetic world have occurred at such a rapid pace that it can be almost called revolutionary. It has swung from traditional to modern in a single stroke. Now is the age of new poetry, new poetic devices, and new assertions unmindful of criticism. There was a day in literary world where a writer could be written off in a single sentence by an established critic. The present is different. It is challenging and is here to stay with a stance, like it or not, believe it or not, agree with it or not.

It is quite demanding for the language to fulfil the needs of modern, experimental, creative writing and be equally enterprising to the reader as well. Recognising the importance of this new poetic wisdom that is unmindful of structural perfection or pleasing, realising its ever inventive sanity and grounded techniques, the literary world turns a new page inviting with appreciation, and with openness. Symbolically represented, ‘TWENTY POETS CORDITE 17’ is all about intellectual new-age poetry. Editor Kent MacCarter stops the reader, clears off convictions, activates intellectually, loosens the grip of reality, making one incapable of idealisation, and then allows the reader to enter Twenty Poets.

The reader is then picked up in turns by 20 Poets, taking full control of senses to the fault. The end-result for the reader is invigorating. Stimulated to the core of one’s mental capacity, the collection of poems finds a way to one’s heart. There lies the success of any writing, any book, any form of human communication - a way to one’s heart.

Poetry, now a form of deductive science in which truth reigns, challenges the reader to inductive discovery, argumentation and participation is progressive. The capacity and ability of the reader is measured not by their ability to solve or understand but by their ability to experience and explore.

It is expected that the poet supports this experimentation and engages the reader thoroughly till a conclusion fits the situation or idea, logically.

With a crisp introduction by Bonny Cassidy – actually accelerating the interest of the reader – activity begins with John Hawke. Editorial cleverness is further revealed by the brief write-up of each poet before their poetry which actually enhances the understanding of their thought process. Hence when Hawke says:

... When Nerval writes that dreams are a second life, he not only refers to the dreams we experience in sleep, but also to the dreams that arise as a consequence of lost desires, dreams perhaps thwarted by chance: of lives once meant, but never lived. … then to write is to desire something that continually slips away, and must once again be invoked in a series of repetitions and beginnings that both conjure and obscure. (1)

this provides the reader a good tool to understand the sensitivity of the poetry:

In grey wind where snow turns to ice, leaving no shelter, you are murdering the woman who made you feel guilty, who called you a fascista.

(2)

This skilfully portrays the mental state of the poet, grey-thinking converting from solid to liquid state before being let out to vaporise in poetic lines. When the reader comes across the lines describing autumn colours, half-formed mountains at the edge of the world, the Amazon running to rock and vast crowds resisting the pressure to meld or mesh, a stark reality of the world takes form and the fact that the poet says, ‘you are outside time, awaiting the moment of ignition’, takes one through a hairpin bend, not knowing if it is addressing the poet or the reader or the world.

You wanted to capture precision, the insides of things, but each new word dazzles you, is a prism of caught light, and you are frozen in captivation. … What was the use of all the lost time learning that you could no longer lie?

(4–5)

These conceal more riddles, revealing less at the first read but, again one begins to read the poem from the beginning to understand better, now that something else has flashed in the mind. ‘Make up a story’, words that bring the poem to an end reverberates again for a considerable time dragging the reader to read the poem once again from the beginning to the end.

Poet Tony Birch says:

Any dictatorship worth its violent salt executes the poets first. It is the way it should be, as a great poem cuts through the crap and goes for the heart and heat like a double-barrelled shotgun.

These thoughts are nicely executed in his poem, ‘Visiting’:

… The river’s edge is beautified now, bridges caged in safety, Deep Rock lies drowned beneath a strip of freeway and long-abandoned sweat shops dazzle with the cheapness of glass in steel. Sitting at the falls I skip stones to conjure a memory of you and see us here on summer nights. Together we carried the river home with us, in our hair and on our skin. (14)

Mez Breeze’s delectable poetry brings surprising cheerfulness through digital fomentation. The poet says:

The codeword contents do fragmentally fold poetic conventions. These microtexts do presentation-lap gently at the cusp of code and poiesis. It employs mezangelle – a type of quasi-cobbled convention-set born from 90s digital fomentation – to form packets of code-laced and culturally inflected output. (19)

If ‘We cry and sob for visual innocence but are happy to bomb and drone or jail (WeCryAndSobForVisualInnocenceButAreHappyToBombAndDrone[orJail])’ is the password for the user ‘celebrity gloss and spit polish’ (20), could be noted by the reader, then one won’t fail to recognise ‘she one lacking slash queen too’ and ‘gapped and greased’ (20).

Playing again with letters and words in the poem, ‘SLaughter | Cauter[DownS]ize': 'Affectivity / affeativity / areativity / creativity' brings out 'laughter' in the 'slaughter' and downsizing (20).

The idle speaking babble, confused and unintelligible talk of gabble turns to technology and it is all now about Babbaging (Charles Babbage!). Coding continues in the lines ‘]#1nce this would have been. Ex[x]plainable. DesIR[L]able. #Now, it r[ gl] ot-stews. Abortive. C[G]lean[ed]. T[M]imed.#’ (21). Outward bracket with a dash ends the poem. The punctuations and symbols that are used to bring about clarity in written language are well employed to punctuate thoughts too. This advances the poet’s skill putting the reader in a tight-spot, making one read carefully, creatively over and over again.

Exploring unfamiliar paths of perception and philosophy, poet Claire Nashar leads the reader excellently sure of self towards cryptic admiration. The poet says:

The poems … do not always start and end on discrete pages, and none have titles, although sometimes the index points a way. Muddle-headed pronouns, tenses and other grammatical disagree-ments reflect the porousness of subjecthood, action and time. Such disagree-ments are always fluoresced by subjects like love, death and life. Where there is blank space in the poems, as with most blank things, it is not empty. (61)

A photograph speaks for a thousand words, but the poem ‘from Lake’, speaks for a thousand thoughts. This rectangle lake is filled to the brim with ‘garfish', 'sea mullet', 'luderick', 'silver biddy', 'black fish', 'school prawn', 'river garfish', 'king prawn', and much more, but you hide to 'fish the most beautiful fish’. (62-63) Thoughts just like this variety of fishes from one’s mind-lake swim in all eagerness and happiness, all lively up through to the brim, wisely ducking from being caught by the fishing line, till being picked up and thrown out. Luck in fishing is not to catch one suddenly, luck is all about sitting patiently appreciating every ripple of water, every trail of witty fishes, and their beauty in eager-living and such lofty thoughts that Nature whispers only to those with sensitive senses.

Another poem without title has fine distinction, irradiated irony and rich substance:

if

and if a

gain in

terred in

plastic

this box

does no

t begin now

to be easy

come

easy

at me

(65)

Earth asking ‘come easy at me’ churns the reader’s guts. Death-Burial equation expands to and towards ecology. Filling up the pregnant blanks, ‘when interred in plastic, this box does not begin now to be easy’, is banefully correct, for the work of Earth begins at the death of some living being. This would signify the emotional call of Mother Earth to humans, humankind – the only natural animal persistent in oblong search of unnatural means to live in life–during life–after life. This poem arrests one’s thoughts magnetically steering to drive home a point of immense importance. It is all about humankind–our way of living–our doing–our death–our way of dealing after-death.

Invoking Nietzsche, poet Javant Bairujia writes:

I have written elsewhere that we need the transformative power of art, any art, in order for life to be endurable … The conceptual poems here ‘forget the currents’, whatever the vogue is nowadays, instead finding their ‘own level, above and below consciousness’. Being is its own reward. Words are empty vessels for the reader to fill. We do not need (auto)biography. Is not poetry a journey, an odyssey or an exploration of sorts? I end (my poem) by saying [w]ithout poetry, we are deluded; we should surely grow older earlier.

This prologue holds the reader to visualise and feel the upcoming poetic vision and signals the subconscious to wake up to delirious experience and hence the poem ‘from Spelter to Pewter’ pops with force. This chemical journey of naturally available, Zinc (Spelter) to the forced combination of Zinc and Lead (Pewter), bonds strongly with the reader, as Chemistry cuts through the poem lying conspicuously to catch the fancy of being discovered again as elemental as natural Potassium, Cobalt, Gallium, Barium, Platinum, Iridium, Oxygen, Calcium, Nickel, Germanium and Lanthanum,  and Thgallium and Rutherfordium (synthetic chemical elements not found in Nature).

It is delightful to read: ‘recoded speech rewritten lab an[n]otation (or Laban [n]otation) radial verbal text remitted bemused Noh meant you are remixed’. (75) Poet Derek Motion says:

The Only White Landscape is an assembly point. Past instances of thought and memory have come together as directed when under threat. The swells of real-life changes underpinning the poetry are physical, social, geographic and romantic. But, that’s so usual: the attempt to find singularity in the ruptures – not meaning, not really. From loneliness to only-ness. (85)

Only a poet can add, ‘romantic’ to an otherwise familiar list; physical, social, geographic. The poem ‘density’ begins with an accurate ordinary fact, 'in long grass everything is a cushion' (86), and progresses towards something static, changing course towards materialistic minimal and again towards a re-take of subtle thoughts:

the ambient potential of a startled wallaby equates legs, specifically, the hemline to sock gap in your context a fine massage ascending the calf muscle, everything staggered, incremental just another word for hand-spans i wish i was an escaped horse, a bolting solo in reverse until time pops: i’ll think of places i’ve been now, filter shit times around formal logic –

(86)

It is such observation of surrounding Nature be-little-ing self that is sought after by a reader because it indulges and immerses soul in a refreshing spring of memories both lived and unlived. The poet’s wish mirrors as reader’s wish, to be an escaped horse, to bolt solo until time pops. This logic of making a reader partake in poet’s fantasies is what poetry is about. This makes the reader agree with the lines:

born & bred & unshod out back, the passing smell of rain gums, muscles loose under thumb & it’s another pointless week spent strategising / wood gathering

(87)

Picking up images en route to later burn them down as memories or thoughts is a day-to-day phenomenon for all of us, poet or otherwise, but to call it a pointless way of spending is stimulating. The rate of success in life depends on the rate of strategising; it is a unique ratio. Again the ratio equates to one; now, that is pointless as gently suggested by the poet. Such thoughts gets carried in the folds of once-read-code and stay there to be relished again when needed.

Another galvanising poet Anne Elvey says: 'What is it I take for granted? Skin.' (91) This alone sends a fresh burst of air filling up the reader’s lungs, catching unaware, and leaves one gasping at the myriad complexities that have arisen around us, around the world, around human existence. Bonny Cassidy’s introductory words reverberate:

Elvey’s White on White marks a turn: mid-career, Elvey’s style begins anew in this collection, which goes deeper into her sustained concerns with ecology, theology and kinship … In Elvey’s poem ‘Prelude to a Voice’, the text is rotated 180 degrees. While this bucks the reader’s optics, it also reflects the conceptual work of this collection: comfort is not sought in the so-called landscape format. Rather Elvey redacts words and lines, corroding an imaginary poem until it gains weathering and porosity. (xvii-xviii)

The poem, ‘On All Souls’ Eve ^’ (92), promises exponential quality aptly taking on the ‘caret’ in its title and delivers it with all significance all through the poem giving it up to the reader to defragment the much intertwined logical conjunction and propositional logic of the poet. Illogical elegance is in the blanks, lands, lines and dots. ‘Sir Douglas Nicholls Reserve had borders’ pauses the reader through a measured line space. Given that the poet is living up to a cause and ‘joining a small and growing throng of  writers questioning whiteness’ (91), makes this line space even more deliberate and meaningfully pregnant. Propositional logic rules now as the poet says, ‘Stones marked each massacre site’ (92) and fills it up not with letters or words but with cartographic carets, sealing the projected meaning with more earth than could be ever sealed with words. The poet continues:

Late evening, we came,                   stood

in turn

each hour

placed candles in clay pots

while the stories were told until day.

(92)

‘Is it cliché to say what is true / that the rain that night came soft and silent?’ the poet asks. For the ‘now’ immersed reader it is affirmative. It is not about the weather outside that the poet is noticing, it is about the past history and the sudden change thereafter till the present. After a pause the rain that came soft and dotted in silence, washes away all the pains of the massacred and sins of doers evenly, dulled by an excellent eraser-time. Silence is what is left at last, after passing through unrelenting complexities, to just the prime-two, male and female, done and undone, bordered and un-bordered, the one who lets others live and the other who doesn’t. The reader takes a lot more un-intended time to turn the page and lingers-on for longer cryptic moments than the poet expects one to stay in her pages. Yet, as if on cue, this poem plays like silken background music in Jeanine Leane’s poem, ‘Colour of massacre’.

Leane says:

Aboriginal women are the great gatherers of many things – food, of course, but also stores and inner strength. The women … taught me to listen to the past as it speaks in the present.

This work is about listening to the past and walking back over it, step after step, to see what you missed the first time. It speaks to what has been left out of official records, recordings and documents – the emotions, the other sides of paper – and what is not said … Writing is an act of remembering a dismembered past. (109)

The poem begins:

A new century dawned and white Australians got urged to feel comfortable and relaxed about their history.

(110)

Stating that, ‘we all have blood / on our hands. We’ve got a new song / to sing now!’ the poet whips the deluded mind by saying, ‘Right-wing historians hummed this new tune / set about to write Aboriginal massacres clean / out of the record, history books, out / of the classroom.’ (110)

Extending the same thought the poetry flows gently:

…The rest is hearsay – oral history’s

words in the air!

Nothing on paper – so who remembers?

The Aborigines didn’t count in numbers –

why bother now?

Nobody recorded those other syllables in time, full of sound, fury, punctuation of blows, blood and screams.

(111)

It is this historic unforeseen emergency that has made the poet write exceptionally with a principal fact - knowing that the subject is dealt with delegation. But, the maxim ‘A person who is a delegate cannot delegate one’s own powers’ applied to poet reaches out to the readers thus: a poet cannot assume that all and every reader has poetic sensibilities, is well understood by the poet of ‘Colour of massacre’. Thus the poetic thoughts switch to universal application:

But, wasn’t their blood red too? Didn’t their loved ones wail? What is the colour of massacre?

(111)

A reader is compelled to apply these to situations of gigantic histories that have left a trail of blood, deceit, betrayal, dishonesty behind a façade of sacrifice, patriotism, lineage and leadership. Such powerful lines leave the reader fumbling and fuming with inevitable rage. The poetry reaches its destination – reader’s subconscious.

With clear indication, 20 Poets is an open walk-through discovery of poetic excellence. Poets have not submitted their poetry for this collection; they have performed on the stage of agreement. An agreement with humane consideration manifests at the end of each performance.

It is neither a collection of poetry nor a free book to be read for fun, it is an opportunity for aesthetic enjoyment and enhances the power of logical thinking.

20 Poets showcases not just the talent of twenty calibrated poets but also highlights the ability to analyse and estimate performance-accuracy by the editor, Kent MacCarter. Kudos.

The idea of 'moonlight on oleander' offers a complex image from the outset. A beautiful and poisonous flower, widely spread around the world, the exact origin of oleander and its name is subject to debate. Despite the threats its toxicity poses to humans and animals alike, oleander remains a popular presence in gardens. Hetherington’s prose poems mirror this combination of the beautiful and sinister, interweaving all aspects of human life. The collection is relatively uniform in style, primarily composed of brief, almost episodic prose poems, with the occasional longer prose piece. Each poem is a snapshot of human experience. Love, death, violence, childhood, politics, art and history. There is little not approached in this richly varied text.

There is a visceral quality to the poems, celebrating immediacy and intimacy. In ‘Soil’, this is heralded with confrontational verbs, clashes of communication paired with the earth, combining the acts and words of humanity with the land:

Pinched, tasted, spat – worms, earth, sand. Grit in the mouth gathered with language; sun touching a lolling arm. Utterance a thrown rug on which to lie down. A further lump of speaking like a rock. Cascades of talk like diving fronds of fern. White legs frame a spade and clods, the new world a child’s fervent dream. Clots of nouns and writhing, soiled verbs. A sky like a blanked illustration. Doings and undoings of hands. (106)

The poems do not linger on one place for long, before moving to another setting. ‘Soil’ is immediately followed by ‘Frame’, which catches the ominous oleander link to continue the notion of human communication and its frequently ominous connections with life:

A stillness near a corner of the picture frame; a river jetty with boys practising bombies; an old car bobbing with two girls standing on the bonnet. They dive and surface, splashes of pale light. There’s a beach and a nearby angel. At four years old he grasps a straggling feather. His parents’ talk is the tide’s burble. He thinks of a scorpion’s beautiful tail - reaches, and someone bats his hand away – sucking an oleander leaf, its bitterness filling the mouth like nascent thought. Under another oleander he reads novels with Jane. ‘We’re characters,’ she says, and all one summer he imagines a developing plot. The stillness is what’s unwritten; what declines to stay. (107)

Oleander is generally too bitter to be willingly imbibed to a toxic level, but fatalities have historically occurred. The young boy struggles to capture meaning from what he witnesses, focuses on the natural world to ground him, but still returns to oral-fixated images as a means of self-expression. However, such expression is evasive. Hetherington’s punning on 'what declines to stay' flirts with the slippage of language as a complete means of expression, its temporality and ability to be re-imagined under another 'developing plot'.

Relationships between people are central to Moonlight on Oleander, with the prose poetic form capturing poignant moments in a series of narratives. In this sense, prose poetics is an ideal mode, capable of balancing the speaker’s frequently lyrical observations with a distinctly dry tone. The form is a melting pot of tensions, made natural. Human relationships tend towards the bittersweet in Hetherington’s collection. Hetherington depicts tense moments of contact between men and women in poems such as ‘Shower’, as well as families and lost connections in ‘Ghosts’. The prose poetics serve as beautifully layered snapshots of image and emotion. In the final two poems, an emotional weight behind the text arrives: ‘Elegy’, memorialising the death of Hetherington’s father and ‘The Black Page’, remembering a friend, are reminiscent of Dennis Haskell’s Ahead of Us with their sensitive exploration of these events.

In addition, Hetherington espouses a firmly anti-imperialist narrative throughout the collection. This is initiated on an international scale with the poems ‘Jut’ and ‘West Coast, Ireland’, and then linked to Australia with ‘New Ways’:

The old ways traded slaves and unconscionable practices. New ways see children behind wire, dragging feet, as if their ankles are tied, who lament in waiting and silence, unprotected even as parents shield them. New ways permit strangers to walk among their intimacies, extinguishing hope in their mouths, as if earth doesn’t own them, as if their breath doesn’t belong to common air. Old ways ensured that speaking out was dangerous. ‘Silence the boat people,’ the new ways say. ‘Don’t let them freely utter their names.’ (60)

Dehumanisation of refugees and involuntary, indefinite detention of vulnerable individuals by the Australian government is sternly critiqued. Linkages with historical atrocities and denial of names, language and voice, are paired, to condemn on-going human rights abuses. This is a collection that is as critical as it is tender, empathetic and unwilling to stay silent.

As an eco-poetic text, Moonlight on Oleander also offers critical commentary on exploitation of the land. ‘Wheatfields’ presents brutal imagery with a hint of changes to come:

We drive towards wheatfields, like the wide pelts of animals long since flayed. Distant silos are giant thumbs, signalling ‘drive this way’ as distorting rain leans, sliding on airy panes. When the small trucks have vanished and wheat has sunk like scatterings of rain into desiccated soil, we see time’s end – a sublimity of long perspectives. Earth stirs. Creatures gather their skins. (58)

Dismembered bodies are linked with human constructions and landscaping, the violence of their coming to being, but these are also connected with temporariness. Hetherington suggests that the land is not content to remain fully subservient. The trucks remain 'small' in the face of 'long perspectives'. More is yet to come.

Paul Hetherington’s Moonlight on Oleander is a fantastic example of the wealth and variety of emotion and experience that can be captured in prose poetry. The collection traverses a range of political and social issues, in addition to personal intimacies and pains, offering a rich series of access points for a range of readers. The text is a pleasure to read in every sense of the word.

Mortality's Fever

The management of thresholds is perilous business.

(49)

Lindsay Tuggle’s first collection of poems, Calenture, is a fitting companion piece to her scholarly study The Afterlives of Specimens: Science, Mourning and Whitman’s Civil War, published in 2018. In their different ways and registers, both books grapple, in intellectual and emotional ways, with an explicitly embodied engagement with death: its horrors as well as its fascination, its persistent pulse beneath the skin of the living. Precariously balanced on a threshold between life and death, these poems contemplate and dive and retrieve - making them both difficult and disorienting, while also eerily beautiful and seductive. Read together, they weave a siren song of the cross currents of grief as it tugs variously toward despair and refusal, the desire to somehow redeem what is lost and the desire to embrace, to follow into death’s alien fields. These are important poems which enact what poetry at its best is sometimes able to do: to enable a reader to make greater sense of life’s most difficult and otherwise unmanageable experiences.

As Tuggle describes in a 'Preface', 'calenture' refers to ‘A fever incident to sailors within the tropics, characterised by delirium in which the patient fancies the sea to be green fields, and desires to leap into it.’ (ix). This complex blend of the febrile, of the power of illusion / delusion and of a longing for immersion or even return to ‘green fields’, informs all the poems as they range across a number of scenes of loss and even into the imagined experience of death itself. While these poems tackle death and mortality as universal human themes to be analysed intellectually and through the emotional specificity of the image, they are also explicitly personal. Not only does the poet grapple with the prospect of her own death, as we all must, but it is made more visceral, urgent and unavoidable through the looming remembrance of the death of her sister, Amanda, to whom the collection is dedicated. It is this death which literally haunts the collection; ‘her long arc into the lake’ – held, in the imagination at that point of heart breaking incipience – is envisioned by poem after poem as something aesthetic, beautiful as well as violently impossible which continues to influence everything.

As poet, Tuggle enacts a fine line between voicing loss and being drawn herself toward the dangerous allure of its deceptive waters. Her poems articulate the dead, acknowledging their specificity - ‘she’s prettier now / in coffined silhouette’ (5) or ‘her face went glittering / worn not quite with beauty / but an easy symmetry / you fall into ‘ (11). There are also moments in which the ‘Hysteria of reminiscence’, its greedy accumulations of memory, leads to a vertiginous identification with the dead: of ‘decades walking in dead girls’ shoes’ (13) or ‘Some days [when] her face obliterates my own’ (15). As she describes it, this push me-pull you is an ‘echolalic duet between what is lost and what is left behind’ (ix); the poet-sister must always refer back to the absent-presence, the power of ‘The    Ghost beside me’ (26), while simultaneously seeking to move forward, even to heal the wound.

The second half of the collection is a long and intense sequence of poems entitled ‘An Elementary Treatise on Human Anatomy’. As is outlined in the notes to the poem, this sequence responds to the work of nineteenth century anatomist Joseph Leidy and the production of the anthropodermic text – a book literally constructed from human skin. This disturbing image embodies a gothic strand which highlights the bones and organs beneath the carapace of ‘self’:

The body re-enters the weather an altered urban bedizen. Such cutaneous armour still fails to staunch the bleeding.

(51)

It also draws attention to the potentially fetishising gaze which the living direct toward the dead. Channelling something of Leidy’s perspective and his colonisation of the dead bodies of his female patients, these poems suggest the ways in which a living, active and masculinised  gaze might seek to control and to know the body of a feminised other, reduced to the passivity of a corporeality, a body evacuated of agency:

He.     loathes to cancel her skin. In vascular tracery scars cast lures with an abattoir’s fugue.

(45)

Tuggle makes use of the trope of Leidy and his fascination with the corpse to suggest a number of important and often contradictory aspects of human experience: the relationship between body and self, the visceral embodiment of the human subject; the emotional and physical ‘amputation’ which comes from experiences of death and loss; the sharp severing of what was once an organic whole; the suspect desire on the part of the living to hold onto, to keep the dead somehow inscribed upon the skin of the living. These elements are cleverly explored through the idea of Leidy’s dissections as a kind of eroticised grotesquery of the female body in particular and the concomitant desire for control over the always slippery business of staying alive and keeping death at bay.

As poet, Tuggle builds her own craft from this same set of uncomfortable tensions. It is impossible to leave the ‘ambiguous wound’ of loss and mortality alone, just as it impossible to provide any kind of redemption or revival of what has been severed – although perhaps we must always try. Many of the poems are structured around a tight and often bewildering dialectic between lines yoked in couplets or short stanzas, where meaning tugs and eddies and calls us into the lure of calenture, the green fields of promise which are always at risk of morphing into suffocation and silence:

No silence is more beguiling than a ghost’s except the invitation of an ambiguous wound.

(19)

In this sense, the collection operates as elegy, although it is perhaps an ‘elegy with no end in sight’ (14), or one written ‘in [the] clavicle,’ the mortal limits of a human body (48). The poet’s momentous task then, as writer of the elegy, is to negotiate this ‘ambiguous wound’: to outline its un-closeability, to seal what it is possible to seal, to temper its hypnotic power and to thereby render such an abyss more manageable – and less dangerous – for the rest of us, as we hover, fascinated and appalled, on its threshold.