Some years ago I wrote a poem called ‘A Table of Coincidences’, which contained the lines: ‘the day Christopher Columbus discovered America / Was the day Piero della Francesca died.’ This is a verifiable fact, unless changes in the Western calendar have altered things. Clearly, I was being sententious and reactionary: the ancient good of the world and its new doubtfulness seemed to start on the one day. A hostile reviewer pointed out that every date in the world is the anniversary of some other date, and poured scorn on my notion by suggesting that a momentous event like the Armistice in 1918 might share a date with the invention of Coca-Cola. But we still honour anniversaries, and I am only too conscious of the 365 days that have passed since 11 September 2001.

Let me remind you, however, of a different anniversary. Fifty years earlier, on 11 September 1951, Igor Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress was given its première at Teatro La Fenice in Venice. The Twin Towers was a calamity: The Rake’s Progress, a celebration. The world is always ending and beginning. All writers, but especially poets, only comment on the world: they are seldom good at causing things to happen. This essay continues the sententiousness of the self-quotation I began with: from the Iliad to King Lear to Fredy Neptune and Mercian Hymns, poetry goes on being the world’s most unquenchable commentator. We may be tempted to say, rather sniffily, that it tends to be ‘the Questioner who sits so sly’, or we may puritanically rebuke it in the person of Thersites in Troilus and Cressida – ‘nothing but wars and lechery’ – but it does us the signal service of miniaturising our pain while intensifying our feelings. It has survived thousands of years of being ignored by the history-makers, who might discover, if they came back, that its ‘out-of-the-corner-of-the-mouth’ commentary is all they have to be remembered by.

In Alex Miller’s latest novel, Journey to the Stone Country, we are not in Carlton for long before being taken far to the north, to Townsville, and then inland to country that few Australians know. The short first scene is handled with dispassionateness and economy. Melbourne history lecturer Annabelle Beck comes home to find that her husband, Stephen Kuenz, has deserted her for an Israeli-born honours student. He has left a note so sickeningly self-exculpating and badly written that one is glad his future entrances are restricted to mobile phone calls. In despair, and on a whim, Annabelle phones her friend Susan Bassett, who works as an assessor of the cultural significance for Aboriginal people of sites marked for mining and other development. Annabelle flies to Townsville, where the house to which her parents moved after they sold their cattle station, Haddon Hill, still stands.

Soon the two women are on the road, travelling south and then inland to the Burrambah coalmine. There Annabelle meets a man who knew her when both were children and his Aboriginal grandmother owned the Verbena station that adjoined Haddon Hill, along Gunn Creek. This is Bo Rennie, once a ringer and now a representative of the Jangga people in their dealings with business and government. To summarise the rest of the gracefully simple plot: Bo and Annabelle become lovers and head back to their ancestral places, weighing the different sorts of value that each has for them, coming to the borders of the Jangga stone country (where Rennie’s grandmother was one of the last to be born), to the ‘playgrounds of the old people’. The ending of the novel is open rather than inconclusive. As before – for instance, in his previous book Conditions of Faith (2000) – it is Miller’s desire to let the ending resonate with the complicated possibilities so carefully set out in what has come before.

Ann Curthoys’s Freedom Ride is a meticulously researched piece of Australian history, and so much more. It could sit comfortably on the required reading lists of subjects ranging from History, to Government, to Media. This ‘road story’ of peripatetic direct democracy, from people too young to assert the right to vote for change, is also an inspirational text that makes you question your own passivity to the wrongs in our world.

Curthoys tells us that she began this history at a student protest in Sydney in May 1964, at a demonstration against US civil rights infringements. But the details go back to the beginning of the decade, with Krushchev declaring in the UN General Assembly in October 1960: ‘Everyone knows in what way the Aboriginal population of Australia was exterminated.’

Dorothy Porter’s new verse novel, Wild Surmise, takes an almost classic form. The verse novel is now well-established as a modern genre, and Porter has stamped a distinctive signature and voice on the verse form, particularly with the phenomenal success of her racy, action-packed detective novel, The Monkey’s Mask (1994). So it comes as no surprise to find this book setting a similarly cracking pace across some not entirely unexpected territory: an adulterous love affair between two women; and the death, through cancer, of a husband. Additional glamour and some thematic variation are provided by the women’s profession, astronomy. Both women are favourites on the lecture and television circuit, and Alex Leefson’s passionate interest in finding traces of biological life on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, generates some of the more purely lyrical moments.

One of the hardest things to achieve in the verse novel is a balance or, at least, an accommodation between two powerful and often rival impulses: one towards narrative, the other towards lyric. In the main, Porter manages this potential contradiction well, though, if the page-turning quality of this novel is anything to go by, it is arguable that narrative wins out in the end: these are poems that tend to lead you on to the next one, rather than inviting slow, or considered, rereading. At what point does the husband realise his wife’s infidelity? And when does the wife realise her husband’s mortality?