Although there are excellent, moving poems in Recurrence about family, friends, and the suburban quotidian, it is Miles’s mythological poems that are his most characteristic. ‘Isis and Osiris’ and ‘Ariadne on Naxos’ are just two examples. Miles is also concerned to evoke elusive mental states. His poem ‘Forgetting to Laugh’ is as good a description of the universal experience of sleeping and dreaming as one is likely to find.

Despite a necessary vagueness of subject matter, the poem’s language is simple and seemingly inevitable, partly because of its confident free-verse rhythms. The last stanza begins ‘You forget to laugh for a while when you’re returned / to the reassuring air’ and finishes with ‘So you look at daylight / look at the sun as memory comes back / from all the hiding places of the world’.

In some ways, Miles is also an heir to twentieth-century Central European poets such as Miroslav Holub and Zbigniew Herbert, who created their own mythologies and parables to make forceful points about life, death, and tyranny. In ‘Above, Below’, Miles begins with what seems like a Greek myth: ‘Whoever comes from the sky / will be beautiful and callous’ and finishes with the strange but convincing consolation: ‘But the ones who wait below / will only be as frightening as necessity, / quiet farmers keeping their kids / from the dangerous machines and the gun.’

With his second collection, Graeme Miles is clearly a paid-up member of what is proving to be an impressive generation of young Australian poets.