All three collections present correspondences between conventionally animate and less obvious creaturely objects: van Neerven imagines riparian habitats, ‘where / the ducks look like shoes / in the water’ and where she sees ‘rocks tiptoeing across the river / like unsure words’. She decries the lack of care taken for such environments to which so many species are suited, and notes that ‘the pelicans are leaving us / like a line of words’. Species that remain are subject to fatal additives: ‘bassian thrush – chocolate milk / brown cuckoo dove – bronze custard / sooty oystercatcher – tastes better with oil’.

This reminder of mutual edibility and our combustible nature is paralleled in Mike Ladd’s stark and confronting images of human self-immolation: His ‘Gasoline Flowers’ presents four activist suicides as ‘an orange-yellow orchid’, ‘a wavering lotus of flame’, ‘a smoky iris’, and ‘a gaping petro hibiscus’. That these are paired with the delicacy of flowers only serves to underline the atrocities and their impact.

Joel Deane’s haunting collection (Year of the Wasp, Hunter, $19.95 pb, 112 pp, 9780994352859) is a reminder of Susan Sontag’s ‘night side of life’, with the body beset by illness as alien and captive: ‘At the Base Hospital / the old man was sleeping, / hooked up like a cow / in the shed for milking.’ Once again, a human is presented for consumption, aged but with a childlike skull, within which there is that buzzing which never allows it to feel still. Deane’s leitmotif, the wasp, gets inside the ward, ‘scrawling graffiti in negative / space’, and inside the patient’s head. As a correlative to his stroke and concomitant aphasia, ‘a wasp performs a pig Latin liturgy / on the tabernacle / that is his tongue’. The insects also appear to have the power to ‘turn people into verbs’, uncertain and harsh vectors of memory, jerky, unsettled kinesis. The outside environment forms part of this febrile process: the sky ‘dreams / in dead languages: scratches the corneas’. Memory struggles with erasure when writing the limen of being not entirely one or another.

The creaturely word seems to confirm this, with visitations from an owl and ‘a seagull with ants for eyes’, correlatives for madness, clawing at the confinement and panic. This is followed by a nod to Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’, which holds its own and then some: ‘My mind’s not right, Cal,’ mutters the poet to the dog, Caligula, while searching for words or communication with a willow tree as next door ‘a barbecue is burning flesh’. This scene of unsettled domesticity evolves into a further vector of unease: ‘A whirlpool of sparrows / perform a perfect om, / but the circle / is too perfect. / They are not birds, / but a scree of drones / triangulating.’ The waspish presence delivers ‘auguries’ that pertain to this as well: ‘every killing demands a reply’, and, as the seasons change, ‘nameless millions begin to hum and swarm’. It is as if the buzzing, sonorous multitudes of being create a music on the edge of annihilation that finds no easy lines of release.

Mike Ladd’s forms of disquiet are attended by presences such as a mosquito, under the net and in the mind, with its ‘needling, invisible whine’ and a deep distrust of contemporary urban business (Invisible Mending, Wakefield Press, $22.95 pb, 136 pp, 9781743054079). Even his home town, Adelaide – ‘old quincunx’ with ‘that little brownsnake of a river’ – is put forward as something strange and slightly obscene in its regularity, a place where heatwaves arrive and ‘birds drop out of the sky and die on the softened bitumen’. The surrounding land conveys a sense of menace: ‘My beautiful eucalyptus, / what treacherous bastards you are / now the fire-farmers’ ways are lost.’  The European occupation has resulted in places such as a ‘sheep station [with] a concentration-camp haircut’. Forests are claimed by the state: ‘The track’s obscured by fallen trees. / There’s no easy way out of here.’ Finding firewood becomes a fraught activity. There seems nothing simple or fair in these configurations of control and country.

Forms of beauty and flashes of brilliance survive, such as in his Malaysian pantuns, conjuring a ‘shift back and forth between nature and culture; little worlds built in the face of transience’. One of these is evident in ‘Dirt,’ a route through sacred country, where ‘the termite statues / begin with circles / grow / into roadside gods’ of all creeds, welcoming travellers to ‘this battered, / holy ground’. The road’s significance is the very dirt: to invert Stephen Muecke, there is no sealed surface on the original ways.

Deane concludes that, in this chaotic, violent world, ‘though we have no time to live / we have just enough time to love’. Van Neerven, reflecting from the streets of Panaji, remarks that ‘everything here seems unfinished’: an observation as correlative to loneliness and transitory affairs, yet at the end of her assured and eloquent collection, ‘Buffalo Milk’ flows with vitality in lines of self-awareness and a uncommon sense of craft. In a similar vein, Ladd’s final poem, ‘A Country Wedding’, recounts a ceremony with a ‘rice-paper cage’: no metaphor, but immanence in ‘the fine-grained constellations’ that mark a shared way, encapsulating the direct and unmediated nature of three voices traversing the fault lines of self and country.