Hard Horizons is a surprising title from a poet as genial, balanced, and humanly moderate as Geoff Page. It comes from a title poem which appears to be about insects (‘Mostly they appear by night / to … / … scuttle up the walls of cupboards’); then shifts to the questions, ‘What is the secret of their breeding? / Why is it they keep coming back?’ The poem shifts again with T.S. Eliot’s ‘last twist of the knife’ in its bald last line, indeed in its last word: ‘Hard horizons. Hopeful boats.’ Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers is surely something we will look back on with shame, the contemporary equivalent of the White Australia policy. Page’s anguish is unstated: the poem shows a poet of experience, one who knows that less is often more.

Some of his titles – ‘Lone Gunman’, ‘Assisting Police with Their Enquiries’, ‘Wikipedia’ – demonstrate that Page sees poetry as deeply linked to daily news and culture. There is nothing snobbish in content or manner about Page as a poet: his poem with the grandest title, ‘The History of Western Thought’, is characteristically ironic – it is a jokey title about a ‘senior’s moment’ (a two day ‘moment’) trying to remember the name of G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel’s writing is about as tortuous as any philosopher’s gets (which is saying something), so Page’s plain person’s speech (‘For two whole days he disappeared’) provides both witty contrast and relief.

This plain stance belies the intelligence and knowledge that inform Page’s poems. His irony, wry humour, and emotional understatement mark an aesthetic of ‘Art is that which hides art’ – in my view, the most valuable aesthetic of all. Page writes mostly in stanza form with short lines (i.e. shorter than pentameters, our poetic standard gauge) and adept rhyming, so skilfully that at times his poems might seem too cut and dried, but he writes against easy certainty, against cruelty, against arrogance. His poems in fact celebrate ‘an openness to doubt’. He can enjoy ‘the pleasures of the evanescent’ but conveys a sense that human nature is a constant, and that human mistakes are repeated through his- tory in different contexts. His is a compassionate, empathetic, forgiving voice; in a world of Putins, Trumps, and Hansons, we could do with more such voices.

Ron Pretty’s The Left Hand Mirror is a major, substantial volume, covering human life from birth to our possible future as cyborgs (‘Silicon Valley may yet be making our unmaking.’). Geographically, it ranges from Australian country towns to Europe and, especially, Sri Lanka. The book is divided into three clear sections; the last shares and explains the book’s unusual title. Pretty is old enough to have Page’s concern with ageing, but is more given to its rewards than to a worrying about life’s close. Memory is a ‘vibrato’ (the title of the first section) in consciousness, and for all the troubles invoked, human life seems rich and rewarding.

In considering a still evening he is aware that ‘nothing as perfect as this / can long endure’, and the first section includes a number of in memoriam poems, some explicitly so, some implicitly. Pretty is a keen portraitist, of individuals such as the poet Deb Westbury and a grizzled fisherman nicknamed ‘Burley’, and of Australian types, especially male. In a witty, fast-paced yarn, ‘Parks & Wildlife’ is named for a character who ‘drinks … in the empty bar’ because ‘shaved head’ and others desert it when he comes in.

Pretty is a more discursive, more descriptive poet than Page, and his poems have a strong narrative bent. The brilliant ‘Stentman Sonnets’ are unrhymed sonnets in various forms (e.g. the first is a sestet followed by an octet) which recount the process of having nine stents inserted with grim humour and no self-pity. ‘The Doubting’ is a sequence which retells the Genesis, Lazarus, and Easter stories in a parodic style that Nietzsche would have loved (‘There was light. Let there be God said the waters.’). Lazarus’s sisters get on his wick because a ‘meddler’ (Christ) has stopped them getting their hands on his land. In Pretty’s view, we are very much physical creatures dealing with the heat of primal urges fragilely controlled by the ‘cooling shift of culture’ and with no easy answers to our condition. We can only love one another and die.

Geoff Page (left) and Ron Pretty (right)

Most poignant of all the narratives is the third section’s sequence, which tells of adopting and bringing up in Australia orphaned children from Sri Lanka. Pretty clearly has an affection for the country itself, and its recent bloody history enables him to make great use of its physical shape resembling a teardrop. The poems contrast individual human warmth with the impersonal, often murderous acts that make up large-scale history. Humanity in the nation which he otherwise admires is ‘suspended by a single, fragile thread’, and that is most obviously shown in the helpless babies given up for adoption by poor unwed mothers. Adoption by affluent Westerners saves some children and leaves others behind, ‘their arms raised up’. Even the saving raises ‘Doubts’ (the title of one memorable poem). The problems of taking children from their birth mothers and their birth culture into a more comfortable Western life are ones whose solutions are beyond the human, but there is no doubting the honesty and ethical urgency of the poet’s questions.

It is not too much to say that The Left Hand Mirror is a book by a skilful, intelligent, and thoroughly decent person. Although it is most often ignored, that last adjective may be the most important of poetic qualities.