All of these moments pertain to knowing not just how but when to sound a note, whether it be comic, uncanny, odd or wondrous. In Keith Harrison’s poem – entitled ‘An Old Woman Sings in Her Bed but Makes No Sound’ – a sense of timing becomes an acute sensitivity to time itself: ‘I study my hands, dissolving into nothing.’ But poetic timing can be problematic in a culture in which any poetry is more or less mistimed. Peter Porter, this year’s distinguished guest editor of The Best Australian Poetry series, admits as much in his introduction when he notes that, despite the strength of the poetry currently being written in Australia: ‘The boom in verse I noticed in the seventies when I first returned to Australia has disappeared.’ As the general editors, Bronwyn Lea and Martin Duwell, note in their foreword, since last year’s anthology there have been two notable losses for Australian poetic culture: the closing of the all-poetry journal Salt-lick: New Poetry and the closing of the publishing house Duffy & Snellgrove (publishers of Les Murray, Peter Goldsworthy, and Stephen Edgar, no less).

From this ambivalent situation, The Best Australian Poetry 2005 offers a timely reminder of poetry’s continuing relevance. That poetry can be timely is made clear by J.S. Harry (described by Porter as ‘the most arresting poet writing in Australia today’). ‘Journeys West of “War”’ (an extract from Peter Henry Lepus in ‘Iraq’) finds Harry’s earlier character Peter Henry Lepus (aka Peter Rabbit) philosophising his way across the ravaged landscape of Iraq’s Western Desert.

The poem is both frantically humorous and utterly serious, navigating its way through the philosophical unrealities of the world and the moral realities of the word. The poem belongs to something of a timely subgenre in recent Australian poetry – the Iraq war poem – notable instances of which have come from Robert Adamson and Jennifer Maiden. Both Adamson and Maiden are, like Harry, attracted to the strangely original, which suggests that this might be a subgenre devoid of conventions. Harry’s extraordinary poem is worth the purchase price alone.

Talking of CDs, one of the most engaging moments in the book is Geoffrey Lehmann’s masterpiece of light verse, ‘Thirteen Long-Playing Haiku’ (even the title is a winner). This sequence concerns the vicissitudes of being a collector of CDs, and it has a piercingly funny authenticity: ‘I’m bailed up by my son / at the top of the stairs: / “Mum, he’s hiding more CDs / in his Financial Review”.’ No doubt this appealed to Porter, who often refers to music and recordings in his own poetry.

As both the poems by Harry and Lehmann illustrate, The Best Australian Poems 2005 is impressively freighted with long poems. (‘Journeys West of “War”’ runs to sixteen pages, which is a testament not just to UQP’s commitment to good poetry but also to the journal that first published it, HEAT). Of the other longer poems, we find a notable display of skill, imagination and ambition (something that Australian poetry seems increasingly comfortable with).

One of these poems, John Jenkins’s ‘Under the Shaded Blossom’ – also published first in HEAT – is a stunning ‘counterfactual’ poem (why should prose fiction have all the fun with history?) in which the American modernist poet and insurance executive Wallace Stevens meets up in Cuba with Meyer Lansky, ‘the Mafia’s chief deal-maker and strategist in Havana’. The narrative is pared back but effective, and the poem is both disciplined and lush, a good description of much of Stevens’s poetry: ‘And here, too, / a single quiet dwelt, within the poems he made of things.’ ‘Under the Shaded Blossom’ is, for me, one of the best things that Jenkins has written.

Another standout poem is ‘The Vital Waters’, John Kinsella’s twelve-page account of Cambridge, England (where Kinsella spends part of the year as a Fellow of Churchill College). It has the trademark Kinsella mixture of fecundity and left-of-centre ways of seeing. It is rambling but never lax; it offers a sense of what it is like to live in Cambridge (real people and places are named throughout) without being exclusionary; and it is expansive but clear-eyed. This is a Cambridge with more than Wittgenstein, colleges and the Cam. Here we have ‘gas-tower / youth in the Grafton Centre’, the Cambridge Health Food Shop, ‘solstice-gazers’, ‘Reggae tribes’ and Syd Barrett (the psychedelic-rock casualty who left Pink Floyd before their superstardom). As is the case with his other longer poems, Kinsella does more than one thing at a time here: there is history, critique, lyricism and diary. Perhaps that is apt for a place that is ‘a home. A cyclotron of language / that won’t let up for a minute.’

The richness of ‘The Vital Waters’ stands for the richness of the anthology as a whole, from its editor’s witty and lucid introduction (in which he nicely refers to Les Murray as ‘our captain, never frightened of being put into an open boat by his mutinous crew’), to Jennifer Maiden’s ‘cluster poem’ (in which disparate themes and metaphors are magically tied together), to Dorothy Porter’s piquant ode to Agatha Christie, to Craig Sherborne’s description of a journalist’s shorthand (‘At first glance a sheet of music / but with all the notes broken’), to Peter Steele’s poetic rendering of a painting by Vermeer (showing again that he is the master of listing in poetry).

Then there are the Contributor’s Notes. However much others might blanch at poets giving accounts of their own work, I feel that these are almost always interesting, amusing or informative. Joyce Parkes’s history of her poem is almost as entertaining as the poem itself. Much of the poetry in The Best Australian Poetry 2005 will be challenging for those not in the habit of reading poetry, so the Contributor’s Notes are no bad thing for an anthology that is presumably trying to find a ‘general readership’ for Australian poetry. This placing of challenging poems in a welcoming, helpful context is one of the series’ most attractive features. This year’s Best Australian Poetry also raises one question: when will the guest editor be a woman? (Men have guest-edited this series for its first three years.)

Remembering that this anthology aspires to offer not just the ‘best’ but also ‘Australian’ poetry, there are two longer poems that remind us that timing is, especially in the field of poetry, also a matter of placing. Time without space, scientists like to remind us, means nothing. Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s elegant sequence, ‘From the Island, Bundanon’, brings together the disparate objects, lights, animals and histories of Australian landscape (and, for that matter, skyscape). His description of the wombat, ‘in dusty fur’, is marvellous.

Fay Zwicky’s long poem ‘Makassar, 1956’ reminds us in this age of border security that parochialism is ultimately harmful to our sense of history and identity. Relating a sea journey from Australia to the old world of Europe, Zwicky writes (like Kinsella, but with a different temperament) both richly and exactly. Europe, however, is not of interest. The focus of the poem is a glimpse of Indonesia in the 1950s and the poet’s memory of herself as a young woman in which she experiences a vision of otherness: ‘My heart stood open like a door.’ Zwicky’s poem, like so many chosen by Porter, is a poetry of the world, a powerful realisation of time and place.