Tennyson remains an influence in later poems such as ‘My Heart Has an Embassy’, which imagines Julian Assange’s intramural London quandary, and ‘Maps in the Mind’, an eerie reckoning of Manus Island: ‘The isle of the dead is always sand ... as wide as grief away, / as quarantined as cholera, a day / away from any port, like Manus Island.’ There are some erudite nods to many poets, to Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, and Slessor, along with echoes of the Middle English ‘Pearl’ poem in the repetition of last and first lines from stanza to stanza, and in the use of dream and waking as enlightenment, but Maiden’s poetry remains utterly original.

The early poems are flashier, with cramped menacing images and elusive endings: ‘The beach here has / a grin of treachery. It jangles / its serrated coins at the moon.’(‘For Schools’), while later poems tease out theories that once were cryptically suggested: ‘Is the US / need for war not “a way to teach Americans / geography” as Bierce is often quoted, but / a greed for abstractions: for the abstract, rather, / not met by food or sex or fashion, by / any intimate geography but this?’ (‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’). For the past twenty-five years, Maiden’s mellifluous facility has turned to interpretative commentaries on current politics. Characters wake up in the world’s hotspots, which they then investigate, yet, as they stir, the poet is also awakening into a dream of her imagining, her world that is the poem. In lilting conversational tones, Maiden creates what she has called a three-dimensional philosophy, in which action and dialogue might cohere into, or perhaps disrupt, theory: ‘Any / writer is a private revolution, all / writing is desire, although such / axioms are vulnerable.’ (‘Dracula on the Monaro’). These discursive blank-verse narratives and fencing dialogues also include ‘diary’ poems, a movement that began most directly with The Winter Baby (1990), which signalled motherhood. The poet’s private irritations can seem jarring, but Maiden, like John Kinsella, is unabashedly open to a poetry that disentangles all thoughts and censors none: ‘One needs the private voice / to balance a public terror’(‘Diary Poem: Uses of Privacy’).

Among 1991’s television reliquaries of the first Gulf War and, later, the internet’s ubiquity, Maiden’s tableaux further investigate the media’s simultaneous familiarity and estrangement. Acoustic Shadow (1993) and Mines (1999) introduce contemporary figures of power. As digital media bear the news instantly, so Maiden responds instantly, creating a parallel exploratory medium – poetry. Friendly Fire (2005) and Pirate Rain (2009) heighten this movement, with a credibly bumbling and vengeful George W. Bush ‘obsessed as always with Baghdad’:

Before the Land War, the Republican
      Guard
in their bunkers choked on sand
      bombed down
ventilation shafts. The children
smart-bombed to bones in Baghdad
      suffered less.
We’ve buried the war. It always was
something the good journalist expects
who knows his side will win ...
      (‘Keeping the Lid On: A Gulf War retrospective’. 16. Premature Burial’) 

Hillary Clinton, Gillard, Rudd, Bush, Trump et al. are plucked from the newsfeed’s simulacra into a confessional of frailty and doubt where they can commiserate with their immortalised mentors. Character, and the casual immoralities of power, are revealed not through the un-selfied soliloquy but through dialogue, dotted with learned interjections from the poet. Some poems switch abruptly from third-person narration into first person: ‘I will have / a face that means I must have a brain / when I am older. And use it ... my heart and my hair / will explode like the first gold rose’ (‘Madeleine Albright Wears Two Lapel Pins’). Here, character can only exist through contrast. Even Trump (Appalachian Fall, 2017), in an astounding feat, cannot escape the writer’s curse of imaginative empathy as he converses with his Scottish mother. Pairings of people, places, and theories rustle through Maiden’s poetry, erecting a vibrant stage of argument and slippery negotiation. George Jeffreys and Clare Collins, a May–December stereotype transposed from the now five-volume ongoing novel Play With Knives, weave through scenarios like an agile soccer drill, examining, even sometimes resembling, each new catastrophe and conundrum like a Greek chorus. They infiltrate, or awaken in, each new locale, manoeuvring through shadowy hierarchies of power. George meets Saddam Hussein in a Baghdad cafe:

‘There’s a 25 million reward.’ The man
sighed, ‘Do you want that, Mr. Jeffreys?’
George said, ‘No, but George Bush
     Junior
has the soul of a bounty hunter. I’ve
met him - there’s more danger there than
a sane man might suppose. You just
destroyed your country, you know,
     but he
is destroying his whole empire, bit by
bit like Lego for a suitcase ...
          (‘George Jeffreys: 6’)

Jennifer MaidenMaiden’s impetus is partly driven by the ethical dilemma of how to ideally balance the incarnate and the disincarnate – between life as it is experienced and how one must theorise, or write it. This eternal steering between thought and action propels the poems, perhaps most apparent in her recent book, the profoundly lyrical Appalachian Fall, in which a politician’s dead mentor is often a writer. Such pairings are also life and death, comedy and elegy. Maiden’s poems teem with ideas and opinions, ‘cartoons ... too energetic to be sinister’ (‘George and the Holy Holiday’), with brief but illuminating disquisitions on art, poetry, music. In this, her third Selected Poems, the first seven books are pincered into sixty pages, which lessens their impact and Maiden’s variety.

It is unfortunate, too, that the new, mainly digital Quemar Press has chosen such an inelegantly busy cover, strewn with awkwardly lopped images of the poet reclining, and a crowded, unsympathetic layout. Nevertheless, this volume is the most thorough and up-to-date compilation yet of Maiden’s phenomenal oeuvre.