Puncher & Wattmann

Andy Kissane’s fourth collection, Radiance, is a heartening answer to those who, like publisher Stephen Matthews, lament that ‘many modern poets choose to shroud their work in point-scoring obscurity at a time when clarity and accessibility might encourage more people to read poetry’. Kissane doesn’t address this issue directly, but his book is an important negative instance.

Twenty pages from the end of his New Selected Poems, Geoff Page imagines being ‘an heir of Whitman’, and muses that ‘I think I could turn awhile and write like the Americans, / they are so at ease in their syllables, irregular as eyelids, / various as the sea’. These lines are so cleverly Whitmanesque that the idea seems momentarily plausible. Only an astute reader will stop to think that the sea is hardly various at all – and how irregular are eyelids? Page’s poem, we might realise by this stage of the book, is presenting wry, understated humour, and this is one way in which he seems a deeply Australian poet, utterly unlike the Americans.

Towns in the Great Desert, a New and Selected, may be the collection that defines Peter Boyle. Among Australian poets, Peter Boyle is an exotic, one who is likely to be read far into the future.

A signal flare, known mostly for its use as a maritime distress signal, has the ability to illuminate a disproportionately large area for what can also seem, given its intimate, hand-held origin, an unnaturally sustained time of several minutes. It is also the title of Anthony Lawrence’s fourteenth collection of poetry. While the phrase itself is not to be found in any of the poems, the poetic idea offered by ‘signal flare’ is powerful and lights its terrain.

This is one of the more vital and significant poetry anthologies to appear in Australia. It has been compiled with a purpose as sophisticated and complex as the arguments for existence that it posits. It is an anthology not so much of ‘region’ (it is a rather massive one), as of the experience of being or having been from Asian heritages in contemporary Australia.

In The Resistance to Poetry (2004), James Longenbach claims that ‘Distrust of poetry (its potential for inconsequence, its pretensions to consequence) is the stuff of poetry.’ The Australian poet Laurie Duggan has based a career on a creative distrust of poetry, or at least a certain kind of attitude to ...

David Foster’s earlier Dog Rock novels came out of his experience as a Bundanoon postman in the 1980s. A recent brief return to his old run has provided irresistible material for a further comic foray into rural life. Dog Rock: A Postal Pastoral (1985) and The Pale Blue Crochet Coathanger Cover (1988)observed the changes in a country village under the rather flimsy cover of murder mysteries, but Foster sacrificed his postman, D’Arcy D’Oliveres, to the task of narrating The Glade Within the Grove (1996). Now, a few years after the immense achievement of Sons of the Rumour (2009), D’Arcy rides his Honda 90 again. Of course, readers need to overlook the fact that D’Arcy died of lung cancer before he could finish The Glade Within the Grove. But D’Arcy’s death is not fact, it’s fiction – so he can rise from the dead, without any need for miraculous cures or mistaken identities, to narrate Man of Letters. In this novel, he tells the locals of Dog Rock that he was dead and buried ‘only in a manner of speaking’.

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 ...

In his Keepers trilogy, Philip Salom is an Eliotian Fisher King, exploring the fissuring of identity in a triple play of plurality. The first book, Keepers (2010), was written by Salom, but authorship of The Keeper of Fish and Keeping Carter is attributed to Alan Fish and M.A. Carter,respectively. In his role as editor for these two poets, Salom becomes their gatekeeper or, as he states, their ‘amanuensis, editor, mentor and promoter’.