Archipelago, despite its apparent yearning for ‘plain speaking’, portrays a voice cognisant of a fractured Modernist poetic lineage, particularly as it moves through a France that materialises in classical, artistic, and poetic references. Aitken’s speaker utilises a wry intellectual chat that seems aware of the poems’ slippages between the present and history, between things as they were and as they are made in the poem, between the physical spaces the poems inhabit and the literary traditions they appear to evoke – ‘Both stupid and brave / we walked back into the f Century’. Aitken thus puts to use a fractured lineation that often interrupts the flow of the poems, creating a staccato, paratactic, almost imagist effect, which adds to the simultaneity of things, times, places, and literary figures evident in Archipelago. Aptly, the speaker ‘surveyed the process’, perpetually examining the ‘process’ of writing and making, and what this does to both the spaces the poems inhabit and how this in turn informs the identity, or identities, of the speaker – ‘I can see myself in there.’

Aitken’s speaker is often on the move, like a tourist writing a travelogue or a poet on a ramble seeking introspective understanding. In its restlessness, Archipelago illustrates a process of division and reformation. Time, place, and the self are in flux, under constant scrutiny, subject to, while simultaneously creating, an inexact language that ultimately attempts to bring the disparate strands of the book back together. As the first poem in Archipelago self-reflexively asks: ‘And where’s the source of that?’ It is a question the reader is often led to ask. Aitken’s book seems often driven by its allusions, establishing a variable array of references, material things, and voices that establish and colour the drive-by imagery of the poems. By evoking and directly naming such literary icons as Char, Pound, Ashbery, Flaubert, Shakespeare, and Rimbaud – whose ‘Drunken Boat’ is a significant influence on the shifting, detached speaker of the book – Archipelago wilfully acknowledges its traditions, attempting to find its own voice within its significant influence, co-opted by the speaker to be drawn attention to in the contemporary settings and voice of the book. As the speaker intones in ‘Devotional’, they are ‘our ornaments’ and add a luxurious ‘glow’ to the poems, islands in the ‘archipelago’ of the book.

In comparison to Aitken, Elizabeth Allen’s Present utilises a more direct poetic style, it is conversational, shorthand, and collagistic, a voice of the internet meme and Twitter age that is popular among younger Australian poets. Allen’s ability to imbue the apparent simplicity of her language with humour and pathos, without either overshadowing the graceful directness of her approach, marks her a poet of considerable talent. Allen’s speaker is present, clean, and (for want of a less loaded word) confessional. Her speaker is also very funny: notably Australian in its self-deprecations and asides, both discomforting and familiar – ‘Emma covets my yellow cardigan // I covet her baby.’ Allen’s poems drift between short, punchy, self-contained poetic lines, revealing prose poetry, and shorter, jokier poems that often expose the hilarious hopelessness of the world. Hers is a voice of wit, warmth, sweetness, anxiety, and all the contrasts of a mind trying to cope with the world of love, social media, writing, moving, maybe just coping, noting, ‘Sometimes I am starring / in the movie of my own life’, though sometimes she is ‘only playing / the supporting role’.

Adam Aitken and Elizabeth Allen

Allen’s use of collage – a technique that can distract the reader from the text itself – performs the delicate tightrope walk between not drawing too much attention to its presence, as her sources fold into the fabric of the work and the world of the poems, while simultaneously drawing enough attention that the reader recognises the pop cultures, internet spaces, and languages Allen puts to use. She examines how these sources inform the concerns of the speaker inundated in a world of media that establish the impossible standard of what we should be and aspire to. The highly amusing poem ‘eHarmony Quick Questions’ mines Wikipedia, Dirty Dancing, seemingly random (real) websites, and lyrics from a Taylor Swift song, all of which amounts to a poem that asks, ‘How romantic are you? / How trusting are you? ’, and answers, ‘Please do not touch // This item has functional sharp points.’ I cannot think of a better way to capture the hyperreal, vulgar strangeness of internet dating.

The conflicted and unsure speaker of Allen’s Present, dealing with not only online disconnect, but dispassionate lovers, loneliness, gardens, memories, and shopping, heads ultimately towards the brilliantly dry final long prose poem, ‘Inpatient (Impatient)’, which is set in the wards of a psychiatric hospital. Despite this slow descent into the white-grey numbness of quotidian medical routine – standing in stark opposition to the hallucinatory terrors of Artaud and Nerval – the voice of Present maintains its approachability. It is an impressive accomplishment, reaching out to the reader to take them directly into the bright, sometimes shaded worlds of the poems. Present asks for understanding and in its elegance achieves a startling amount of page turning empathy. Rarely have I devoured a book of poetry with such manic appreciation and understanding of the speaker’s quibbles and problems with the world of love and life.