The judgement of an anthologist is something of an easy target. There are surely readers who will be resistant to the hubris of defining the ‘best Australian poems’ of any year and will nominate sins of omission and commission; who will find some of the chosen poems insignificant, distasteful, inadequately imagined. I did, but they were few, and since there is more than enough churlishness in public discourse at present, I am not going to name them, but rather concentrate on the collection’s strengths.

One of these is its structure. Page has not taken the line of least resistance and presented his poets in alphabetical order; rather, he groups their poems thematically in a rather surprising sequence that begins with the satirical and morphs into the erotic via the witty fantasising of Anthony Lawrence’s ‘Lepidoptera’. Since poems often have complex subject matter, there are connective spillages and slippages between and across the groupings. Page speaks of the collection as having an ‘ongoing narrative’; I was more engaged by its sense of ongoing conversation – voice and contra-voice playing around themes to build subtleties and complexities against any easy pinning-down of the subject matter.

To return, as exemplification, to the question of eloquence. It would be hard to find a more elegant erotic eloquence than in Judith Beveridge’s ‘Dreaming of Yasodhara in the Rain’, but one is bounced from it to consider other instances of overt eloquence patterned differently and for different ends: to the sustained exuberance of Nigel Roberts’s artfully random declarations of what he would do for friendship, another manifestation of love, or to the controlled rage of Samuel Wagan Watson’s ‘Blacktracker ... Blackwriter ... Blacksubject’, where eloquence finally voices its own denial because ‘it’s with the pen that the lies are used to overwrite the Dreaming, and the written word will never be worth the country it’s written on’. Here the patterned reiteration of key words reins in, yet intensifies, the capacity of the prose poem for breathless energy. That latter quality takes on very different tonality and significance in Cassandra Atherton’s ‘Anonymous’ and Lisa Brockwell’s ‘On Becoming a Housewife for the First Time at the Age of 41’. These two poems slyly manipulate a lack of apparent sequence so that it becomes both a reference to, and a denial of, the supposed inconsequentiality of feminine discourse.

Andy Kissane

In a different mode altogether, that of social realism conveyed in a traditionally formal sonnet, Andy Kissane turns despair at the poisoned lives of nineteenth-century girl makers of matches into something that is profoundly disturbing and yet a denial of despair when the sisters laugh ‘at their teeth – / glowing green and ghostly in the warm cave of the bed’. This may not be quite what Geoffrey Lehmann had in mind in speaking of poetry as being ‘bathed in a mysterious glow’ (‘Why I Write Poetry’), but it is a striking example of how one imaginative moment can move the solidly responsible poem of social observation into another dimension of perception. A similar effect is achieved by Louise Nicholas in ‘How to Scale a Fish’ when the reader is told that the impersonally noted sheen and fragility of the scales on the dead fish resemble the skin of ‘your’ bed-ridden mother, ‘her knees, when the blanket fell away, / gleaming / as if unearthed in moonlight’.

Nicholas’s poem is grouped with those about animals, though it might well have figured in the final section on mortality, where Thomas Shapcott asks if there is ‘a language for dying’ and Clive James affirms the vivid continuance of the world as consolation for personal fading away.

It is hard to do justice to all the threads of this collection. The social spectrum is broad. Apart from examples of the poetry that returns us to a communal past via childhood memories like those of Judith Rodriguez (‘Recollections’) or Jan Owen (‘History Lessons’), there are several interesting groupings of ‘current issues’ poems.

Among more conventional animal poems, Les Murray, David Brooks, and David McCooey form a subset touching in different ways on contemporary self-consciousness about the human carnivorous condition. Murray, characteristically, will not be corralled into any such modish position and slips away into an image of the human boy as a trusted custodian of hens; Brooks on the other hand moves from satire of Christmas preparations into uncharacteristic directness on ‘the squalor of the feedlots, / the horror of the holding yards / the abject terror of the abattoirs’ (‘Silent Night’); while McCooey cannot help evoking the pleasures of ‘thinly sliced animals ... on the soft lunar surface / of sourdough bread’ even as he asks what will cure him of the taste for it.

Geoff Page (photograph by Alison Hastie)

Poems on asylum seekers from Andrew McDonald, Anne Elvey, and Tim Thorne are marked by sympathy and indignation. Religion gets a kind of respect from Paul Kane and Vivian Smith, but is more often approached sceptically, as with Alan Wearne’s ‘Anti-Clerical Polemic’ which demonstrates that rhyming couplets are by no means dead as an instrument of invective. And of course there are those more predictably continuing themes – poetry itself and nature/landscape, a field where Robert Adamson and Robert Gray demonstrate their standing as masters.

Geoff Page has made a strong case for his broad church and it would be a hardened soul that found no printed eloquence amid these pages.