Bruce Dawe’s new collection is called Border Security ($22.99 pb, 94 pp, 9781742589138), but his world remains firmly suburban, reminiscent, good-tempered, and largely non-judgemental. These are all excellent qualities, and piqued in this case in just the right amounts by the occasional drop in pressure or poetic percussion. There is little wildlife, nature, or art. There is, on the other hand, rhyme and metre, veering between invisibility and glaring thump, giving the reader a chance to consider the point and effect of these structures. ‘Gallipoli’, for instance, is at the double march time: ‘Pay tribute to Anzac valour / That served to define us, too / With the dogged sun of their courage / Above that sea of blue.’

Everything there serves its purpose, whether you like it or not; a purpose that surprises a little, at the end of the book, after so much wry containing, especially after the poem ‘Sea of troubles’ about asylum seeker deaths, where the lines never stop their ends and the rhymes course on like waves, without making too much of that fact.

Dawe’s uxorious devotion, sometimes smothering his capacity to express it poetically, charms; as do various humorous sallies that trip over themselves, but, rather in the manner of Keith Waterhouse, they have great appeal anyway. The book’s essence is the capture of moments ‘especially chosen from the lived life ... digging potatoes, marvelling at the modest glory of fruit, or the work of Cezanne’. Shades of Jonathan Richman there, but Dawe brings the reader softly back down to earth when his wife finds an old, blind dog, its end sadly clear because ‘we feared it was too late for him to make / new friends in this exquisitely incomprehensible / new world. So we learn again what ‘haunted’ means’.

Alan Loney returns with Melbourne Journal ($22.99 pb, 95 pp, 9781742589114), a selection from his ‘notebooks’ of 1998–2003, and a prequel of sorts to the excellent Crankhandle (2015). Once again, all is untitled and fragmentary, but in this earlier Melbourne period the fragments are less printerly, more philosophical and decisive, so that what are posited as fragments take on a more free-standing existence. It is as if, despite himself, he puts everything in, even in a line or two. A longer paragraph, on page seventy-eight, begins ‘there are times when what I most envy about Sappho are the holes in the papyrus. That so much can be, no, it’s not ‘left out’ (tho John Wieners, sd Bob Creeley to me once, wanted to know how much of an experience can be left out and still have the language active), but just not there.’

But Loney feels much more modern and gathering than Hellenic and absent, however convincing the chagrin. There are thoughts and criticism, often delivered with a Bergeresque finality, and it is fitting that the epigraph to one section, ‘Not enough and too much’, is a fragment of Heraclitus translated by Guy Davenport. That indicates Loney’s context and timbre as a scholar. As a poet, he is here, among the reading and observation, a man finding his way in a new city, as tentatively as any other.

He sits, pensive, by Darebin Creek, watching birds, and is in equal parts fascinated by a Merri Creek dragonfly and appalled by humanity at Northcote Mall. Overhearing and observing, too much alone, occasionally unaccountably happy, and always trailing clues, the voice of the book whispers regret at being helplessly Marxiste – tendence Groucho – recovering to assert that ‘it is hard to think clearly about emotional matters when the writer in one takes over at the drop of the first word’. The body of the book disproves its voice, thankfully.

The general sense of threat and distance that characterised David McCooey’s last collection, Outside (2011), has arrived and materialised in Star Struck ($22.99 pb, 87 pp, 9781742589107), in the form of a ‘cardiac event’ His response to this experience, set out in the first part of the book, is instructive. The event is examined, forensically, and the context given an ironic once-over in a tone that is, if not actually dispassionate, at any rate far from passionate. The writer takes over here, too.

In emergency, the event confirmed, ‘Almost as if / they were not yours, tears start / coursing down the side of your face. / “What’s the matter?” a doctor asks / “I’m just labile,” you say / and the doctor is satisfied. / You are speaking his language.’ That deadpan tone runs through McCooey’s hospital time, as does a determination to face down fear, which is only a trope, he seems to say – to be kept at bay by Muriel Spark, as ‘the doctor appears with his / silent staring students: graduates / from The Village of the Damned’.

In the second part of the book, McCooey, recovered, appears to take greater relish in his playful side. ‘Rhyming 1970s’, in particular, fizzes with delight and nails that definitively McCooey combination of screen, life, and music that energises him. In a highly original take, he forensically, gleefully, demolishes his own poem ‘Whaling Station’ in the light of new evidence.

The book then falls into a ha-ha of its own making with eighteen ‘Pastorals’ (dramatic monologues by or about various figures from popular music). His evocations, of Brian Eno, say, inventing ambient music in his hospital bed, or (bizarrely) Gabrielle Drake, are faintly embarrassing, however genuine their intent. Perhaps that is the problem: he loves music too much to wield the scalpel.