Pearson, however, nowhere tries to persuade us that we need Goethe or, indeed, need the Roman Elegies’ signal achievement – their re-location of classical measure, classical myth and classical amorality in the minds of the then contemporary German audience. Pearson’s aim is to convince us, rather, that we need a wine-drinking, amorous, humane, Melbourne-based Pearson – all written up via the writer’s urbane, somewhat unusual enthusiasm (very Melbourne) for Goethe’s poetry.

Melbourne Elegies is, in other words, that most ancient of poem-forms, pastiche. But how – if you have surrendered a larger critical logic, if, that is, you have no equivalent to Pound’s, Lowell’s, Zukofsky’s, Logue’s critically motivated form of updating – do you effectively pastiche an exquisite, remote, still lively yet decidedly foreign poem? All too often in Melbourne Elegies where Pearson attempts a literal transcription (Goethe’s ‘Sehe mit fühlendem Aug’, fühle mit sehender Hand’ / ‘see with a sentient eye and feel with perceptive hand’ – Pearson) the talkative economy of Goethe’s acquired ‘classicism’ is turned into standard ‘translatese’. Likewise, a variation like ‘I’m really elated now, inspirited on Brunswick Street’ (Pearson) is neither good Goethe (it is the rather famous ‘nun auf klassischem Boden begeistert’) nor good bathos. Inspirited? Worse, lines like ‘In the morning she will languorously leave our passionate bed’ or ‘Though its elasticity were (sic) going the fireside couch was quite hypnotic’ or ‘And he kissed her matutinal cunt’ are neither Goethean nor poetry.

It’s a pity. I’m no supporter of Poundian methods. A poem which drew expertly on Pearson’s skills as a poet and his knowledge of Goethe (many of these poems started off as more than adequate translations) would be a marvellous thing. Melbourne Elegies, however, all too often literalises the tone of Goethe into a persona-voice which is at once intimate and fulsomely artificial, erotic yet verbose. Pearson seems stuck with it – overshadowed by Goethe, ventriloquising his metres – but unable to do more than gesture (in ‘Miss Ania Walwicz’s Cat’ or perhaps ‘Elegist to Reader’) at Goethe’s Latin models. But Goethe’s poem is full of darkness and ironies – the elegy on syphilis, for instance, the final elegies about going public and abandoning his love. And he has what his Latin originals outstandingly have – a sense of the metrical instant, a sense of vivacity in time and of its brevity. (It’s all said in Zukofsky’s ‘Peri Poietikes’: ‘Look in your own ear and read.’) Mainly long, often very long ‘happy’ moments capture Pearson’s attention: robust sex (straight), lots of undressing and clit, Jeff Kennett hate-sessions. Melbourne’s clearly a better place than Rome. Doubly malign, then, the goddess Typo who even there inspires ‘In Memorium’ (sic) as the title of one of the poems.

How to speak into history’s ear-trumpet is not yet the province of Michael Heald. Yet in these days of look-alike poetry from so many younger poets, a ‘new’ poet’s first collection which has a singular, individual feeling for the world comes as a jolt. Body-Flame’s poems ‘specialise’, if the phrase may be allowed, in the way objects, moods, movements and sudden perceptions intersect in instants of time. Often, they are about no more than ‘minor’ outdoor events – swinging up an axe to chop wood, a haze of midges, brushing into a dangle of wind­chimes at an outdoors market. Sometimes they are about extremely sharp back-of-the-mind sensations in which the drama of broken relationships is the conscious story-element. All of these poems, however, relate to the mapping of a highly specific type of experience –  an awareness both of the temporariness of what we are and do but also of the passing moment’s intensity. They evidence, as Heald puts it in his poem ‘In the Markets’, ‘the collapse of my being there’.

Not dependent on abstract critical terms, many of his poems read like short moments of access to a particularly acute body-sense, read or to a heightened out-of-time ‘virtuality’ in the contemporary construction of emotion. A poem like ‘In the CD Shop, the Heart’, for instance, counterposes bizarre associations provoked by looking at a complex, digitally imaged CD cover with his own back-of-the-mind sense of a threshold level of meaning which will, somehow, always escape detection. Similarly in the poem ‘Rather than Gone’, the forgettable act of crouching down to unlock a bicycle offers the enigma of fullness in what occurs – a memorable but also paradoxically blank feeling for a building over there, a river across the way. His best work is often in these microscopic reconstructions of the materiality of experience and its time-elapse.

Heald’s work, in these and similar pieces, is spare, precise, elegant and utterly his own. If his work falters briefly, then it is where first books often do – in occasionally over-sensitive obeisances to today’s political issues. Or in odd moments of emotional and thematic evasiveness – such as the opening poem of the otherwise powerful sequence ‘Separations’. But Body-Flame is a striking book where (Heald’s words) the ‘perennial intensities’ of the informatic, body-conscious, relationship­obsessed age we are part of must be distinguished from ‘the dark’ a good poet can ‘lavish on their remoteness’.