Ross Gibson, in Stone Grown Cold ($20 pb, 64 pp, 9780994259622), also employs a kind of fragmentation, but one that is far more gothic and monumental than Loney’s and far less inclined to let ‘thinks’ enjoy an existential holiday from significance. His fragments are far more likely to end in a monumental full stop. In the twenty-page ‘Incident reports’, they are numbered and therefore in order: the order does not ostensibly matter, but it is there. This fits in perfectly well with Gibson’s previous orderings, for example in Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002) or 26 Views of the Starburst World (2012), and most particularly the numberings of the photographs in The Summer Exercises (2009), his illustrated novel based on 100 mysterious and undocumented black-and-white crime scene photographs of post-World War II Sydney.

The ‘incident reports’, and much of the book besides, are like a shooting script for a murky green film noir, with a dash of apocalypse thrown in, mostly set in a semi-imaginary Sydney full, he says in the preface, of ‘sham company promoters; hollow share hawkers; men loitering in yards; mendacious women loitering in yards …’ and other unsavouries, including variously dumb and glamorous meth addicts and chancers. It is all calculatedly baroque: ‘Beware metallic lamplight. Limp inside the building. See the hygiene / apparatuses: how they’re glistening and seething. Eavesdrop / on a roughneck: “Let’s go fuck her in the chicken shop.” Witness a dull green / phial of liquid shining when the light’s off.’ But it is reminiscent enough of the Sydney we know from elsewhere: for example, in Michael Aiken’s A Vicious Example (2014), to make one accept it with a shiver of enjoyment.

John Hawke’s Aurelia ($20 pb, 52 pp, 9780994259615) comes from an academic perspective, and a more ‘traditional’ one than the poets-who-do-PhDs often manifest. His attachment to French poets lends his work a kind of dream like miasma that comes directly from their gestures of longing. Hawke reminds us that it was the poets, not the theorists, who first saw the world as Sign. So it is that, in the title poem, Aurelia, herself only an image, transforms the world for the poet, who enters ‘that forest / of symbols where everything coincides / These correspondences find their relation / in the name of the absent beloved, / as if the world of visible signs were itself / a vast and scattered alphabet, / out of which this lost word / might be recombined and rediscovered.’

‘It is a welcome development to have the online Cordite Review sensibility fixed in print, in a palpable way and on a graspable scale’

That is the general tenor of the book – dreaming of the imagined and lost, and trying to capture it, but ending with a handful of vague consonances. If that were all that was in play, it might all be too sonorous, as it is on occasion, but Hawke injects just enough of the un-Gallic and the modern to sharpen the senses.

At the rear of the book, as a counterweight, there is, first, ‘The Conscience of Avimael Guzman’, a longish poem that appears to be a psychodrama about that cold-eyed revolutionary, but feels more like a sustained psychoanalysis of poetry itself and its sociopathic, cannibalistic urges. Hawke’s book transmutes itself, mysteriously, from consideredness to a kind of rage: it is a rather frightening, but enjoyable process.

Enjoyment is not on offer to the reader or reviewer in Natalie Harkin’s Dirty Words ($20 pb, 56 pp, 9780994259639) and it would be jejune and defensive to seek it: this is a book of pain, anger, and declaration from an indigenous poet and artist. There is also love, of land and kin, and its expression is that of, as Harkin says, ‘a mournful rage with beauty and deep love between the lines to disrupt and transcend the pain and disdain’. The book is a kind of thesaurus of dispossession and insult, with entries from A to Z, but not in any particular order. So we have: ‘Apology’; ‘Land Rights’; ‘Xenophobia’; etc. – all ‘tagged’ at the foot of the page to connect to other poems and reinforce the ubiquity of the problem.

In many of the poems there is at the top a statement of the problem (for instance, in ‘History Wars’ a long and appalling collection of utterances from Christopher Pyne about history teaching), with a poetic riposte below. These are sometimes, however eloquent, overwhelmed by the initial quotation, which has already told us what is wrong in the clear and disdainful bark of the tone-deaf politician. The poems here feel almost helpless, even where they defeat the quote, as in ‘Mythology’, and it is only when Harkin writes directly of family, justice, or place, with no insult to gainsay, that the language takes off and becomes incantatory. In ‘Resistance’, the poet honours her Aunties, who have preserved culture and fought for justice and change, ‘These days / I think of Aunty Veronica / one of a kind / big-hearted-warrior woman / there is so much work to be done / and she / would sing-chant-rage and carry it all.’ Dirty Words is Natalie Harkin’s brave, shaky stab at living up to that, and she reminds herself and us that speaking up is hard and unsettling for all concerned.