Caitlin Maling’s début collection of poetry, Conversations I’ve Never Had (Fremantle Press, $24.99 pb, 81 pp, 9781925162028), is similarly concerned with landscapes, both familiar and strange. The raw savagery of many of her poems is chilling and it is in these more sinister moments, that she demonstrates her deft poetic boldness. The collection opens with two extraordinary poems, ‘The Path to the Dam’ about Robert Farquharson’s filicide and ‘To Robert Thompson’, a modern apostrophe to one of the murderers of James Bulger:

When you and I were ten years old you killed the baby.
I learnt about it on the radio
on the way to a Power Rangers birthday party.
…
Now you and I have grown up together,
but I’m still not at that point
where I can take your mind in mine,
feel that little hand you felt pulling away
and only tighten my grip in response.

Less convincing are poems such as ‘Shark Days’ and ‘Donnelly River, 13’, which read more like lineated microfiction, and the poems based on Greek myth which feel forced and out of place in this collection. However, the adolescent landscape triumphs and the emphasis on age, with poems about being seven to nineteen, make this a poetic Bildungsroman set against the Western Australian landscape. It is a place to which Maling pays homage in many poems, including the playful ‘Directions’, which reads like a local version of Lucky Starr’s ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’:

Karijini by way of Cataby, Geraldton, Dongara, Carnarvon,
Exmouth; by way of the Brand; by the way of driving out at
midnight, by way of fences and flame trees and bardies; by
way of moonlight and the Dog Star, the Cross and Corona
Australis …

Dennis Greene’s Here Be Dragons (Puncher & Wattman, $25 pb, 86 pp, 9781922186706), juxtaposes the imposing Western Australian landscape in poems such as ‘Stirlings’ and ‘One Tree Bridge’ with the tantalising ineffability of the undiscovered country. The collection’s title refers to the way in which English mapmakers used to indicate the edges of their known world. In this way, Greene charts untraversed landscapes of the mind and what lies beyond understanding. In unique poems he explores life as performance and mortality as a Shakespearean adventure:

It starts with one – one life, one seat,
one stage,
     one man alone on stage in darkest
Elsinore. He has
     his face, a way to be, his name, his
place in history
     assured simply by being there; his ups
and down, his
     family tree, he has his own fair share
of family squabbles;
     a common man, he plays his Hamlet
on the streets
     against the backdrop of the playwright’s
preferences:
     he knows his place and for a moment
there before
     the others come he is the sum and total
of humanity.

Greene’s poetry suggests that immortality can only be achieved in the intimate landscapes of family trees and in the memories of those left behind.

In many of the poems in the sequence, ‘The Map Is Not the Territory’ and the poem ‘Uncertainty Principle’, the end line rhyme is distracting and a little predictable. However, Greene’s use of intertexts as wide-ranging as van Gogh, Yeats, Winston Churchill, Che Guevara, and Ophelia provides a powerful commentary on the enormous comfort that can be found in familiar sources during the darkest moments.

Lucy Dougan’s The Guardians (Giramondo Poets, $24 pb, 76 pp, 9781922146755) is a brilliant anatomy of survival, resilience, and reflexivity. Dougan describes this as a ‘midway book’, and it is from this central position that she confronts the intimate landscapes of loss and regeneration. Dougan writes profoundly on our genetic inheritance, the ‘Uncertain map of family trees’, signalled in her stirring Harwoodian ‘Poem on All Soul’s Day’:

foolish to think
that your stubborn body
with its genetic hand-me-downs
is not implicated
is not the haunted house

Family trees are unreliable, and yet analysis of our genealogy can accurately predict our predisposition to certain things including illnesses, like breast cancer mutations, which can be genetically inherited. Dougan tackles this in a moving suite of poems on surviving breast cancer, from driving to chemotherapy to radiotherapy tattoos in ‘The Deer’:

The radiographer’s face
is a smiling lesser sun
tracking between the two small moons
of her tattoos;
One between her breasts,
One beside her armpit.

Cancer literature can be therapeutic for the writer, but is often best left in ‘journey journals’. Dougan demonstrates that cancer can be written about in a cerebral and potent manner.

The Guardians prizes matrilineality with poems about the bond between mothers and daughters. Indeed, Dougan confronts mortality and genealogy in ‘Julia Reading’ and ‘A Picture from Julia’, where the narrator describes her daughter and then finds herself, in a poignant moment, being sketched, in return, as ‘a very wintry picture’.

Finally, Dougan’s use of totemic animals captivates the reader. These non-humans, with their long evolutionary history, are presented as kin, as in ‘The Shy Dog’:

My fingers explore the small ridges of her skull
and we are shifting into a landscape of grasses,
moving with the tribe.

Poet and scholar Andrew Taylor identifies landscape poetry as that which ‘translates our awareness of how we relate to the rest of the world into a shared language’. These four poets are invested in communicating the intimacies of the Australian landscape and the geographies of survival.