‘Sydney in verse’: this anthology, arranged chronologically, presents the country’s oldest European settlement in a variety of guises – from place of exile (‘Botany Bay’) to site resistant to the colonising discourses of English Romanticism (W.C. Wentworth, Charles Harpur) to new city viewed through the lenses of symbolism (Christopher Brennan) and modernism (Kenneth Slessor), and from there to the locus of the universal, crossnational themes of joy, suffering and loss.

Like any anthology worth its salt, this one presents a pleasing variety of subjects and styles, just as it charts most of the major shifts in the nature of poetic form and style over two centuries. The poets have been chosen not on the basis of residence but rather on their choice of Sydney as theme and idea. This results in some felicitous inclusions, such as the English poet Charles Causley’s resonant war poem ‘HMS Glory at Sydney’.