As in her previous collections, there is no swagger or braggadocio. Falsity of tone or temperament is not a feature of this unassuming if yearning writer. The subjects are often modest, peripheral, domestic, yet they can reverberate with more public connotations. One such poem opens the collection: ‘The Getting of Wisdom’. The first line in the book is surely deliberately placed: ‘As my mother said’ – an unostentatious but pointed epigraph. Cabramatta/Cudmirrah, her previous book, revealed the extent of her filial mindfulness. In the new poem, a kind of muted sadness runs through these maternal legacies, which become bleaker with recollection, like a rueful dream:

… Treat others as you’d have
done unto you, never boil abalone
in the pressure cooker, a little Ajax
on the teeth for whiteness, we’ll buy
them a present but let’s only give it
to them if they’ve got one for us.

Elsewhere, as the poet moves around in this pleasingly peripatetic volume, there is a sense of defensiveness or defeat, if not defeatism. There is nothing romantic or redemptive about this identification with misfortune. Travel sharpens her innate sense of the mortal and the tawdry in the civic, as in ‘Lightning Ridge’:

An emblem of the town’s history,
a shack made of beer bottles becomes a museum.
Easy to imagine someone down on their luck
slapping the cement on an empty.

Harrison is always at her best when she is roaming, uprooted, somehow stateless. Even a fairly modest poem like ‘New Year’s Eve, Boston Common’ (put of the long sequence ‘Boston Poems’) opens up into something quite strange and isolating:

Children scratch their names into puddles.
Strangers hug each others gloves.
Shots of bourbon burn like Sydney.
I stay past midnight
when the kissing starts.

The influences in Harrison’s work are subtle, and various. In that third line, with its scorched notion of Sydney, one detects an echo of Gig Ryan. Two memorable lines in Harrison’s previous book – ‘like everything else, you / resemble bits of socialism’ – had a similar effect. The slight warp and staccato give the poetry a pleasing edginess and variety, moderating the personal. Good poets jolt us intermittently with the unexpected. Lines like ‘She’ll be describing a third party, a white noise’ and ‘And the sun drinks colour from the fences’ compel us to respond long after the poet has restlessly departed.

Clearly, though, some of the strongest poems in this new collection are unambiguously direct. There is a long cancer poem, frank and observant, but also done with considerable restraint. It reminds me in its spareness and insight of early Hodgins, and late Hodgins, on the same subject. ‘It must have been arriving, always’. The unpunctuated plainness of some of the poems in this cycle heightens the shock, the existential affront.

I ask questions
but more arrive
later when I’m at home
alone in the dark with my cells

Yet even in this state of numbness or dislocation the poet achieves a sort of timeless weirdness which presents her with some of the best images in the book:

you hold me like a circle
like a clock

I sew the hem of a dress
and now you keep away

Reference to Akhmatova in an earlier poem surely offers one possible clue to poems such as ‘The Abbey’:

If I were to say the river has broken its
bank they would open their laps
and cradle my lips which speak the truth.

For me, the long title-poem, another travelogue, possibly too epistolary, seems less successful than poems such as ‘The Light Itself’, ‘The Society of Psychotherapists’ Ball’, and ‘The Remains of the Day’.

‘Loneliness is a habit’, one of the poems suggests, but Harrison’s sensibility is rarely apolitical or unengaged. Notwithstanding the intimate settings and themes, the poet is conscious of broader implications. In ‘Sewing’, the second poem in the book, a driver, arriving home late, is haunted by landscape and evening and ‘the small deaths of each town’. There is a marvellous, funny, and somehow very apropos poem about a naturalisation ceremony in Collingwood in 1992. ‘Ceremony’ is acute in its detail and understatement. ‘The mayoress gave everyone / a native plant, a plastic bag of roots.’ In the end, after the rhetoric and the allegiances and the kangaroo paw, we are stranded, almost ominously, in an empty hall:

… On the floor, left behind,
Lay all the plastic flags
People had dropped in their hurry.

Best of all in this context is the long poem ‘Casino’, which ends the collection. Here the poet achieves a memorable overview:

Rumours will not be believed
but can we trust yet
the weird sciences of our future?
This roll, this deal, this incoherence

Incoherent and compulsive indeed, but there is something almost oracular in the closing figure of the cracked gambler spinning her wheel and bailing out her widowhood:

I’m content with the drift
the microcosm of strangers
their voices like gravel
my gin & tonic minding
my machine, my people.

Readers will admire this vulnerable and exposed poet, many of whose creations demonstrate the kind of ‘nervous heart’ diagnosed in one poem. In a longer, tripartite poem, ‘Lot’s Wife’, the figure of the woman ‘unwraps and sorts the look of death’:

More petrified than ever before
she paces inside her sea-shell calm.
What can she do to undo fear?
She can only look.

In her fatalism, her isolation, and her openness to both, Jennifer Harrison continues to offer a distinctive and questioning voice in our poetry.