Autumn Royal's first collection, She Woke & Rose (Cordite Books, $20 pb, 66 pp, 9780994259660), contains delicate and delicious poetry of an impressionistic world where the immaterial has not been banished. Her aesthetic has aptly been called 'girlesque', too knowing to be girlish; sensually yearning rather than soul-baring. More self-aware than self-conscious, Royal wishes 'to confront rather than confess'. Homages to the confessional poets abound – Plath, Sexton, Carson, even Frederick Seidel. To reference such predecessors and find new ways to hymn the private, as Royal succeeds in doing, shows rare confidence.

In the standout piece, 'Viticulture', Royal riffs on the grape that shares her name. The poem is superficially about a failed visit to the pharmacy and illness in the casual labour force, yet by its end the everyday activity of self-medication has been elevated to a meta-performance of poetic self-cultivation, rooted in the real, yet leaping off the page with perpetual motion.

                                                                     ... the
Autumn Royal grape has a relatively thin skin,
is susceptible to cracking and rot, depending
on post-rain conditions. As I reread this poem
my fruitful tongue reminds me not to overcook it
or I'll kill the word of mouth.

Claire Nashar's Lake (Cordite Books, $20 pb, 57 pp, 9780994259653) is a bewildering account of an obscurely tragic day in her family's life at Tuggerah Lake. Sprawled across the pages with generous blank (but not empty) space, varying font sizes and text registration, the poem demands rather than commands attention. Two pages are blank except for the page numbers. Others contain one or two words, and some only punctuation. The effect is something like passing billboards on the freeway. The words lose their relatedness with each other by being so far apart. Solid images appear like traffic jams.

... your ankle's
thin black hairs float in
browner water soft with
harder sediments that suck
at our white sandshoes.

Near the end there is a block of text where every second word is 'shell', creating a simple wavy beat. Yet in each fourth line two words come between the two shells and the rhythm is disrupted, a subtle touch that hints at deeper skill. The word experimental is thrown around a lot when discussing poetry, but experiments require hypotheses and findings, not to mention the replication of results. These are lacking in the deeply felt yet ultimately slippery and inscrutable Lake.

It is refreshing to see, or rather to hear, music in Rachel Briggs's Common Sexual Fantasies, Ruined (Cordite Books, $20 pb, 66 pp, 9780994259691). Strong, even traditional, metre and rhyme abound. 'Abracadabra rabbit capture.' Her sinewy lines, though they sometimes veer into pop-song facility, pull the reader's eye down the page. The mingling of sex, sin, and forgiveness are prominent themes. 'Schism' is a heartbreaking poem of spiritual yearning.

God and I are not on speaking terms
She hasn't called or written since last year.
Before she left, she kissed me with a theorem
and whispered a sestina in my ear.

In the poem 'No Exit', Briggs satirises purveyors of modern artistic despair. The 'Existential Film Club' shows a 'Paris docudrama by director / Jean-Luc Cock- tail'. Briggs clearly has an un-existential soft spot for her gentle readers.

You've painted it somber. It's almost invisible
there in the corner. Its drawers are upholstered
in contraband lavender, not regulation olive and grey, so you tuck them away in your secret spacetimey,
disguised-as-a-phone-booth armoire.
('Armoire')

Briggs reminds us that poetry which strays too far from music becomes merely a series of prosaic images. Release this book in audio, please.

Spelter to Pewter (Cordite Books, $20 pb, 65 pp, 9780994259646), by Javant Biarujia, reduces language to its basic elements. Like this:

          Ilia Zd s
   in futur Isms salon
of the russia N
                    s Chool

The sequence of sixty-three chemical elements ends with the rarest natural element on the earth's crust, ASTATINE, but there could be a few made up ones stuck in. Biarujia has advised his readers to verify his poem's factual claims. Biarujia has that key quality missing from so much post-avant-garde work: an obvious sense of self-amusement. The rest of the book features cut-ups, collage, quotation, and footnotes splashed across the page. It makes entertaining detective work for the reader and possible solutions appear almost infinite.

A Koel is a type of tropical cuckoo. In Koel (Cordite Books, $20 pb, 93 pp, 9780994259684), a free-verse meditation on biology, symbiosis, and rebirth, Jen Crawford writes of the impossibility of repaying the source of life: 'how did you come into this debt? / breath.' Koel suffers from similarly stilted phrasing and fractured imagery as in Nashar's Lake. The voice is poorly defined, which is perhaps the point in the face of the overwhelming physical world. Extensive endnotes form the rock in whose cracks the poems sprout. Written between the urban biospheres of Singapore, Bangkok, New Zealand, and elsewhere, Koel attempts to articulate the place of humanity in the 'epoch of simultaneity'. The book ends with 'soft shroud', an ethereal long sequence: 'in which // a debtor undoes a suicide, travelling / from graveyard excavation / to floating ova.'

Although he is better known for his fiction, Tony Birch has been writing poetry for decades. In his first collection, Broken Teeth (Cordite Books, $20 pb, 82 pp, 9780975249222), Birch leans towards the civic rather than the personal. In 'All for Australia', which catalogues our official inhumanity, Birch combines the technocratic and the familial. The final section of the poem concludes:

we call on all white men
of military experience and
a willingness to defend

at whatever cost and vigilance
our coastlines, our cities,
our clubs, wallets & women

against the vast mass
of humanity not of us
as we know us to be

This is protest poetry, but it is protest of juxtaposition, not aggression or demand, and is more effective for being so.

Broken Teeth's capstone is 'The Anatomy Contraption', an extended response to the anatomy museum at the University of Melbourne. The use of scientific phrasing against the observation of real preserved human body parts reveals with gentle irony spiritual and natural man within the technical parameters of the teaching display.

Please avoid the eyes of the bodiless child
to your right     do not converse with him      do
not think of him     do not be distracted from
the path of knowledge by him

The offices of Level 7 administer the strict rules of the museum. Birch works their directives into a poignantly humorous refrain whenever a tender thought enters his head: 'all the components in this museum / have passed // (ANY DISSENTING VIEWS MUST BE / REPORTED TO Level 7).'

Though syntactically unspectacular, Broken Teeth is a provocative meditation on history and its insistent presence despite the best efforts of all types of bureaucrats.

Note to Cordite: more please.