Subhi lives with Maa and his older sister Queeny in ‘Family Three’, hoping that the ‘Night Sea’ will bring his Ba back to them. Born in detention to his Rohingya mother after she arrived illegally in Australia, his friend Eli and a kindly ‘Jacket’ make his life one of fitful pleasures amid the uncertainties of camp life. On the other side of the fence, in the nearby community, Jimmie feels besieged by grief following her mother’s death. She needs the comfort of reliving her mother’s stories, which are kept in a treasured book. A mostly absent father and an uncaring brother won’t share them with her; so, since she can’t read her, the stories are lost to her as well. These unlikely individuals meet at a ‘squeezeway’ in the wire, and their mutual needs help them to escape their separate worlds, for a time.

For the novice, Alexander Pope’s couplets can seem a numbing wilderness of equipoise – rhyme balanced against rhyme, half lines balanced around the caesura, regular iambs marching on to the end of pentametrical time (alternatively ‘to the edge of doom’). With a bit of experience as a reader, however, it is the wrought tension of Pope’s couplets that fascinates. The balance is only ever perilously achieved in a world constantly tending to chaos.

The most quotable phrases in his philosophical poem from 1734, An Essay on Man (here republished in an elegant and scholarly edition by Tom Jones), seem to bespeak bewigged Enlightenment complacency: ‘vindicate the ways of God to Man’; ‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast’; ‘my guide, philosopher, and friend’; and, no less than thrice, ‘Whatever is, is right’. It sounds pompous, doesn’t it? However, this is exactly like the Shakespeare game. The most quotable quotes get taken out of a vexed context that gives them quite a different charge. ‘To thine own self be true’, says Polonius to his son Laertes in Hamlet, but it must follow, as the night the day, that Polonius is a posturing hypocrite whose next deed is to send a spy after his son to France, and who subsequently dies of stab wounds partly consequent on his enthusiasm for pimping his daughter to the prince. Google Images tells me that ‘to thine own self be true’ is a popular tattoo. I hope they wear it ironically.

Fifty years ago, Brian Scheer, a tall, sinewy Imperials fast bowler, thrilled a handful of boys by driving bowlers of all descriptions straight over their heads, depositing their deliveries in clumps of thick weeds on a low hill at the northern end of the Murray Bridge High School No. 2 Oval. Imps practised on Thursday evenings, and Scheer was the regular opening bowler in B grade, with just the occasional appearance in the first eleven. He was a useful batsman and made the odd twenty or thirty in matches, but the glory of his strokes, which resembled majestic seven irons by their steepling trajectory, was reserved for practice. I remember he would point his left toe high down the wicket, raise his arms shoulder high, his bat would point vertically skyward and his swing would carry through freely like a golf stroke to its completion. If the Murray Valley Standard had ever sent a photographer to Imps practice sessions or a keen amateur snapper had been on hand, one or the other might have captured something special, a small-town version of Victor Trumper’s ‘Jumping Out to Drive’.

At the end of his new book, Stroke of Genius, Gideon Haigh writes ‘that no great batsman has ever had a more faithful partner than Victor Trumper his photographer [George Beldam]’, because the man is epitomised by the image Beldam took at London’s Kennington Oval in 1905. Words failed to convey an adequate impression of his play. The photo is important in defining distinctions in cricket and particularly batting: art versus science; function versus form; how versus how many; a Golden Age of romance and aesthetics versus industry, productivity, and measurement. Interestingly, Haigh also suggests that in the present visual century Beldam’s picture ‘has secured for Trumper a sizeable corner, while of Bradman there exists no single, quintessential image’. Has art triumphed?

Ellen van Neerven, Joel Deane, and Mike Ladd present poems about journeys, recovery, and healing, from comfort food to the experience of a stroke, within overlapping landscapes as palimpsests for their respective pathways.

Reciprocity through feeding runs through Ellen van Neerven’s first collection (Comfort Food, University of Queensland Press, $24.95 pb, 104 pp, 9780702254055) – reciprocity within and without family. Staples like bread and noodles bring joy and contact through breaking and sharing. The fibrous texture of mango cheeks paired with a found object – half a tennis ball – correlates to childhood; the softness of pumpkin scones and familial Dutch comfort food represent togetherness and belonging, expressing van Neerven’s mixed Mununjali and European heritage.

Edgier correspondences are found in the elders drying out kangaroo tails on a wire fence crossed by settler lines imposed on country. These create their own twisted hieroglyphics, and ‘out here there’s reading to be done’ in order ‘to be a piece in time / not a timeline / or a picket in a fence’. An old neighbour attracts animals, including ‘a tree snake hung with his belts’ – juxtaposed skins of the living and dead. A woman with cancer remembers ‘that day she found a snakeskin by the river / they say grief infiltrates strange locations / usually ties itself around your lungs like rubber bands’. Such lines within the body and spanning country are spun out deftly through the text.