It had a kind of shape imposed on it because of the existence of the imitations of Catullus,

which I wanted to end the book with and which limited to some extent how many other poems I could use. That was a nice ballast.

I would have thought that the ‘I’, the narrator, would have shaped them. The ‘I’ is very present in your poems, which are both confessional and telling tales – the finger points and yet reflects back on the person doing the pointing.

The element of satire becomes more powerful, more important. I suppose I’ve always adopted

that kind of stance, sort of unconsciously, and I’ve tended to write narrative poems. They’re often clearly based on empirical evidence. I tend to get a lot of poems when I’m wandering around St Kilda or sitting at a concert. I do write from that kind of almost journalistic stance. The ‘I’, the persona, is obviously – thankfully – masked. I hope it’s not just journalistic poetry, there’s obviously a lot of transmutation going on there. For me it just seems to be kind of voice I’ve been drawn to.

Which is one of the attractions for me of Catullus; it led me to write those poems.

Here is the great Roman poet who does represent rather decadent Rome and talks about his place within it, or the place of this wonderfully interesting, charismatic character, the poet Catullus. It’s an insinuation into a world. It enables multiple layers of irony, which I hope is going on in my poetry. I have many targets – most of them myself. It’s that role, but I am conscious of a pretty marked change in my work last year, and with the inclusion of six or seven poems – the most serious of which is ‘A Succession of Suns’, a long poem towards the end. I found myself writing much more abstractly, something I’ve never attempted to do, thinking I couldn’t do it.

The associations came quite suddenly. After a long period of writing quite tight narrative lyric

(there are many poems, quite deliberately in this book, about my family and my childhood), suddenly it was as if I’d exhausted that subject and that style. For me the exciting thing is that the associations in the poems are becoming quite wild and uncontrolled. It’s a fundamentally different kind of poetry, and that’s all to the good. I like the narrative form, but I’d like to do other, headier things. It may have been that I spent a few months last year looking at John Ashbery in earnest, prior to the interview I did with him at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, and I’ve always liked him. It may just have been the influence of reading a really great poet who is the master of random, often surreal, associations.

Even with the narrative style, you make leaps and bounds, and there are many allusions.

They’re pretty heavily embellished with allusions, and they can be quite jarring. I don’t resile from that, as the politicians would say, it’s obviously deliberate, the attempt to confound that narrative or to make the allegory, such as it is, more complex. But a poem like, say, ‘The Living Archive’ which is about my parents’ marriage and is densely written, is fundamentally about a family sitting down to celebrate an anniversary. I suppose I’m no longer drawing from basically prosaic events. Now it may be an idea, or a phrase, it could be anything ... it’s less reliance on empirical evidence that I’m pleased about. I don’t know that I’d always want to write this stuff, but it gives you another option for a poem.

You create not only an ‘I’ but also a ‘you’, and this invites the reader’s prurient interest.

The real interest is in an erotic or psychological condition that two people might get into and that provides the tension in the poem. It’s a venerable presentation of two people in a difficult situation. And often they’re quite fluid. I may have in mind situations from different involvements, and ultimately there’s a great deal of mythologising going on about situations I might have found myself in. It’s a universalising tendency that I admired when I read Cavafy twenty years ago. Obviously he’s writing about poignant homosexual affairs, often quite brief, even sordid in a way, but his representation of it is very romantic. You’re spared the tedious detail, and he concentrates on what interests me which is those dilemmas and the anguish – and occasional raptures – that people experience.

This persona is nevertheless a loner, seeking retreat, in an urban secular way.

It’s a reflection of the way I have seen myself. For many years I was like that, not involved in literary circles. I didn’t have a professional life. I didn’t have the kind of busy life that I seem to have fallen into now because of the nature of my work. For various psychological reasons, I guess I do see myself apart in many ways from society; it’s a kind of role. I’ve always been drawn in real life and in poetry to the more poignant and pathetic members of society, whether derelicts or the infirm or the greatly aged. For me there is something profoundly stimulating about visions of otherness and outcasts that have tended to give me poems, and obviously there’s some projection going on there.