Peter Kenneally

Australia is one of the most urbanised and docile societies on earth, but its cities are hemmed in by a vast, poetry-laden hinterland. There is Kinsella in the west, Adamson on the Hawkesbury, and, in this book, the western Queensland of B.R. Dionysius. No one ever seems to be matter of fact about the landscape in Australia. It is politically charged, or Gothic, or, most often, mythopoeic. Dionysius’s book is all of these but mostly mythic: it is a murky, flooded, uninsurable world that he depicts, with the Bremer River as its resident deity.

Some things just don’t appear to go together, unless you are good at puzzles. A fox, a goose, and a bag of beans, for instance; or maybe a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage. Then there are Australia, love, and poetry. Australians and poetry can’t be left alone together, can they, and don’t expressions of love ...

Elizabeth McMahon is afflicted with the love of islands. In editing this issue of Southerly, her introduction tells us, she wanted to explore our fascination with them, in our imaginations and in our reality as an island continent surrounded by island nations.

‘Poetry is a long apprenticeship,’ says Toby Davidson at the start of his first collection. He is certainly a poet who has mastered far more than the basics. Beast Language is only seventy-seven pages long, but feels far more substantial. Davidson has travelled a long way: from west coast to east, from novice to scholar ...

It’s simple. A young woman, her love for her partner slipping away, looks at their suburb, and him, and their relationship, and writes bronze-clad poetry about it. Then she takes to the bush, describing its towns and picking at its history with the same clear eye she uses to examine her lost love. She combines a photographic exactness with a resounding turn of phrase and an ability to use a refrain just enough and no more.

In 1985, at La Trobe University, a sociology undergraduate is in a tutorial with his supervisor. He has chosen to write 6000 words on the role of art and the artist in capitalist societies and his sixty-four-year-old tutor has, rather surprisingly, encouraged him.

In Alan Wearne’s new collection, his not-quite-self-appointed role as chronicler of Australian mora et tempores continues, more overtly than before. Prepare the Cabin for Landing pays homage to the Roman satirist Juvenal and his eighteenth-century heir, Samuel Johnson. Both shared what Wearne describes as ‘that combination of bemusement, annoyance, anger and despair to which your country (let alone the country of mankind) can drive you’.

Michael Brennan has looked into the future in his new poetry collection, Autoethnographic, and come to the obligatory dsytopic conclusions. There is global warming, social breakdown, closed airports and borders, and so on, and, of course, a mysteriously catalytic event – in this case it is called The Great Forgetting. It would be a mistake, though, to think that Brennan is some kind of post-everything Hanrahan, because he and his characters seem to be loving every minute of it. Picaresque, spiky, with an infectious rhythm that makes Brennan’s tangentially connected mini-narratives almost bounce off the page, it collapses a varied collation of literary modes from the past into a dense knot of decay in the near future.

Michael Farrell was the 2012 winner of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, awarded by this magazine. open sesame is his latest collection of poetry, and an earlier version of it won the inaugural Barrett Reid Award for a radical poetry manuscript, in 2008. It has 123 pages.

As a result of the public works of Puncher & Wattmann, it has been established yet again that a book of poetry can andshould combine meaning and design in a shock of pleasure. Toby Fitch’s first full-length collection, especially the central title poem, does this in spades. Orpheus returns to ...