Contemporary Australian poetry has a complex and ever-evolving relationship with the land, both at home and abroad. Almost twenty-five years post-Mabo and entrenched in ongoing ecological crises, Australian poets explore new ways of experiencing and defining place. Where misguided nationalism sought to limit Australian poets to their local landscapes, peripatetic poets have embraced transnational and intimate responses to questions of home. Space in Australian poetry prioritises both dwelling and travelling as intimate psychological activities, a concept that these four poets embrace in their recent publications.

Sarah Holland-Batt’s second book of poetry, The Hazards (University of Queensland Press, $24.95 pb, 112 pp, 9780702253591), is a thrilling psycho-geographical evocation of physical and internal landscapes. It brims with the threat of annihilation and the promise of home. In poems that range in location from her birthplace of Queensland to Nicaragua, Rome, Cuba, and beyond, Holland-Batt demonstrates what it is to be both insider and outsider.

In her ode to California, published in The New Yorker earlier this year, beauty and ugliness cohabit in an explosion of wit in the face of mortality:

I want to ride the long smooth tan body
of California, I want to eat the bear of the flag
of California, I want to roll like a corpse off the highway
of your chase scenes, I want my perfect teeth
preserved, California, my teeth buried
in the earth like a curse, California, and won’t you show me
where the bodies are kept, California,
won’t you show me, show me, show me.

In Holland-Batt’s poems, the drive is always towards death. Home is safe, but death resides in even the most intimate of lived spaces:

When Grandad died, the wonky shack
grew wild, and creepers curtained over.
Through walls thin and threadbare
I heard them hissing, the cold wet tendrils
that cold strangle, and grew on air:
teatree, tangle root, tongue.
                                       (‘The Orchid House’)

Holland-Batt’s stark and sumptuous lyricism is indelible. Her coruscating and percussive landscapes draw the reader into the danger and sublimity of living.

Issue 59.2 marked Westerly’s sixtieth year of publication and the retirement of its co-editors. Issue 60.2 will be the first with Catherine Noske in charge. Unsurprisingly the editors describe this issue as ‘a bridge between two distinct eras’. There are links to the past in previously unpublished material: memoir from Dorothy Hewett and photographs by Randolph Stow. Concern for Aboriginal displacement is palpable in Kate Leah Rendell’s essay on Stow, as it is in Tony Hughes-d’Aeth’s analysis of ‘the assimilation dream’ through Jack Davis’s play The Dreamers (1982).

The past is registered in different bodies in Marcella Polain’s ‘A Hill Road’ and Martin Kovan’s ‘Trade Routes’, while cultural implications yield to the more personal in other poems: David McGuigan’s ‘Nursing-Home Memory’ uses the present participle – ‘tearing’, ‘twirling’ – to evoke both the past-in-the-present and youthful energy, as does Rose Lucas in the delicately suggestive ‘Daughters’, while Paul Hetherington plays with temporal and locational spaces in dense renditions of water.

The Australian Archaeologist’s Book of Quotations is a veritable time-traveller’s guide for making sense of a continent, a nation, and its people. The editors, archaeologist Mike Smith and historian Billy Griffiths, have served up a smorgasbord of archaeological appetisers, with a feast of pithy insights into how Australians are coming to terms with ancient Australia.

If Smith’s Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts (2013) was his magnum opus, this carefully curated collection is an anthology of his greatest hits. Alongside giants of the field – Jones, Mulvaney, Bowler, and McBryde – are the words of Aboriginal people themselves, the likes of Pearl Gibbs, Big Bill Neidjie, Alice Kelly, and Marcia Langton, speaking for their people and their country. There are the old guard and the new; and some unusual suspects – Saatchi & Saatchi, Agatha Christie, Shakespeare, and Oscar Wilde. And there are those who have contributed greatly to Australian understandings of people and place, time and belonging, politics and history, such as W.E.H. Stanner, George Seddon, Greg Dening, Bernard Smith, and Tim Flannery.

Set in Melbourne’s cafés, under its bridges, behind its laundromats, and within its zoo, Leap is a contemporary Australian novel about love and loss. It entwines the narratives of Joe, whose guilt over the accidental death of his high-school girlfriend drives him to work dead-end jobs and train furiously in the art of Parkour, and Elise, a recently separated graphic designer who finds clarity in weekly visits to the tiger enclosure at the zoo, where she feels compelled to sketch the animals. The unusual pairing of a twenty-two-year-old traceur and a middle-aged mother is typical of the intergenerational connections Myfanwy Jones weaves throughout the novel. Joe mentors Declan, a disaffected teen who reminds Joe of himself when he was younger, and their relationships with their parents are a recurring theme.