Edited by Wakeling and Jeremy Balius, Outcrop is a diverse collection of poems from twenty contemporary Australian poets, each with a substantial selection of poems allowing space for the reader to engage with the individual poetics on offer at some length – a good decision by the editors. The poems are all recent, and many of them have not been published elsewhere. The work of well-known poets such as Laurie Duggan, John Kinsella, Peter Minter, John Mateer, and Jill Jones sits alongside that of more recently published writers.

The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin proposed that destruction was also an act of creation, and there is much work here that subverts the traditions of poetry. Dismantling language in innovative ways is not radically new. What is interesting about Outcrop is the grouping of the poets and how differently they dissect, re-imagine, and newly construct the meaning of land. Humanity has an unusual place. At times we are merged with nature, ‘… that handful // of feathers / we all are’ (John Mateer, ‘Auguries’); at other times we are disconnected and adrift, ‘Everything in this garden belongs to our universe, / of no longer knowing who or what we love; / aleatory, you name it, the species made only of / elements common to every property’ (Fiona Hile, ‘Generic Garden Poem’).

I enjoyed Wakeling’s densely conceptual introduction in which he covers many areas of debate and redefinition currently active in the field of ecopoetry: suspiciousness of the word ‘landscape’ (a trope often laden with colonial, romantic hagiography); the idea of the body as a site of sensory experience of land; the many frames within which poetry grapples with ideas of place: urban, pastoral, domestic, gendered, linguistic. I would have liked to see more discussion about what impulses swayed the editors’ selections, especially their wish ‘to depart from later incarnations of landscape poetry that must participate in the conceit of the primacy of the visual encounter with land’. Wakeling, probably because of lack of space, only partially explores some of the issues he raises in the introduction.

Visual aspects of the world aside, does Outcrop offer a new way of seeing land or communicating about it? I suppose we all have a personal definition of radicalism, especially in regard to writing about place. The dynamic history of radical Indigenous writing in Australia has a trajectory that embraces the work of such activists as Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Bobbi Sykes. When I was a student at the University of New South Wales in the 1970s, Sykes rampaged through a lecture theatre of predominantly middle-class medical hopefuls and shocked them into a new awareness of Indigenous dispossession; her activism was defiant, outspoken, and unyieldingly radical. The selections in Outcrop appear to represent a quieter, more intellectualised dissent, sometimes to the point of sameness. The two Indigenous poets included, Lionel Fogarty and Ali Cobby Eckermann, have distinctive voices. Eckermann, though less overtly experimental, offers a deeply visual and experiential relationship to land in which history and ritual integrate past and present. Fogarty embraces humour, linguistic slippage, and parody to reclaim the language of land from colonial taint and imposed correctness:

Ngarrandjeri Ngarrandjeri
It’s a whole lot of horseshit
It’s a whole lot of horseshoe
Where is the real sand, the pebbles
The splash from the ancient Sea
The houses that be
                                                            
                                                                     (from ‘Posh Ports’)

The work of poet John Anderson (1948–97) in his slender volume The Forest Set Out Like the Night (1995) would sit well in Outcrop. It is a little-known work that radicalised my idea of how the Australian environment might be represented. Some of the poems in Outcrop seem to develop Anderson’s ideas: a selfless scrutiny of natural detail; a paring back of verbiage; a radical questioning of the scientific strictures of Linnaean thinking. Of the poems included in Outcrop, the works of Claire Potter, John Mateer, and Matthew Hall possess a similar deep sincerity of observation and immersion in nature’s spiritual otherness.

It was bold to begin the collection with one of the more opaque poets, Nicola Themistes. Her ‘Horizontologies’ engage with a kind of self-conscious ‘language of will’ that at times obscures and dominates the presence of land. More interesting are the poems of Keri Glastonbury, in which gendered radicalism sits beside vigorous excavations into the kitsch cultures of Australia, both urban and rural. The poems of John Kinsella, Jill Jones, Fiona Hile, Kate Fagan, and Louis Armand are also impressive mappings of epistemology, text, and place.

For me, the standout work in Outcrop belongs to Michael Farrell. For sheer imagination and audacity, poems such as ‘The Structuralist Cowboy’, ‘Motherlogue’, ‘Once or Twice or Pretty Boy Swag’, and ‘eucalypt field’ resonate with the radical sensibility of a writer such as Kathy Acker, who once said, ‘Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.’ Farrell’s poems continuously shift both conceptual and syntactic ground but are also entertainingly wacky: ‘I flounce-galumph in: Cleopatra c’est bush moi / a treesnake gnawing at my breastplate (blue willow / pattern).’ Fashioned with sardonic panache from recycled fragments, myths, and images, Farrell also evokes a strange compassion for human folly, a valuable tone in Outcrop.

Even though one tends to single out poems and poets for comment (such as Peter Minter’s excellent ‘The Roadside Bramble’), it is the overall accretion of voices in Outcrop that gives the collection its innovative power and allows the reader to contemplate landscape with different tools of perception and record. The land’s history of appropriation, regeneration, contamination, and nurture is newly cast, and there is an attempt to re-evaluate our myth-making assumptions. The editors indicate that there is a crisis in the writing, a sense of urgency that relates to the current challenges of modern living and the environmental damage that threatens the future of the planet.

One of the purposes of radicalism is to awaken others to new thought and action. In this way, Outcrop is a fascinating anthology. As Laurie Duggan says, ‘I don’t even like found poems much anymore because too / many of them sound too much like poetry to begin with’ (‘They can’t take that away from me’). The poems in Outcrop indeed sound different from what has come before. In some cases, the experimentation impresses as extraordinarily radical and opens up a sense of future hope for the lands and spaces we share.