There are times when I read a book that reinvigorates important questions for me – such as how language carries and creates meaning, and what, after all, is the function and force of poetry. Usually, such a book is a creative work and I like to imagine that the first readers of volumes by George Herbert or John Donne responded with such questions – to poetry that consistently registered a persuasive complexity and which, while emotionally restrained, carried a pithy emotional charge.

Peter Steele’s White Knight with Beebox, published by one of Australia’s enterprising small independent publishers, the John Leonard Press, is a book of this kind. It collects most of the best of Steele’s poems, which are lyrical, questing and metaphysical.