In Colebatch’s most personal work, The Wild occupies a central position. It is best represented by the sea, and the reader will find here many poems about ships and sailing in which the treachery of water is counter-balanced by the ingenuity humanity demonstrates in overcoming its hazards. (The emphasis here on technical skill translates into the skilful insistence on rhyme in many poems, bringing with it the danger of contrivance and distortion.) But beyond the hostility of an inhuman Nature, The Wild is a source of both innocent wonder and an anachronistic code of honour that Colebatch unabashedly celebrates in the book’s title poem:

Battle and brave adventure is but one
face of the mystery. A sense of something high,
some longing, almost unnameable
no human love can wholly satisfy.

This ‘something high’ appears to be none other than the distinctively masculine domain of romance, a world of Christian distinctions between good and evil and one dominated by martial motifs and male camaraderie. In a manner reminiscent of the questing knight with the legend ‘Truth and Beauty’ painted boldly on his shield, Colebatch is quick to enter the public fray with stinging denunciations of perceived enemies, whether it be the sleaze of modern cityscapes, the sycophantic hypocrisy of the art world or the right-minded campaigning of the International Coalition Against Violent Entertainment. In episodes such as ‘Seal Blubber’ his vehemence betrays him into downright venom, while in ‘Drums’ and ‘Bicentennial Impressions from the Province’ his more reasoned detachment secures the efficiency of his barb.

In The Winter Baby, Jennifer Maiden displays a temperament that is at once more sophisticated and more ambivalent than Colebatch’s. Maiden is willing to risk banality and failure in her search for meanings, and in the four sections of this volume she explores a range of forms and themes.

Most poems in this collection are extremely tentative in the sense that, for Maiden, poetry is not the polished expression of thought-out meanings but a process of discovery. She often begins with the mundane, breaking up familiar phrases and bringing in chance ideas, building up a magnetic momentum in which insights accumulate until something sparks and the poem flares with a significance that is both irresistibly powerful and beautifully complex. Listen to the rhythms in these lines from ‘Gladiolus’:

… However
wan the jokes the form suggests
the hue has pain to slow the breath
and press the teeth together.

Poems frequently begin as self-reflective musings on poetry and language and seem sometimes to come unstuck in a glut of unformed images. Maiden explores a wide range of registers, and this becomes unsettling when the most unlikely registers collide side by side within a single poem. Again, however, this collision sets up tensions that make for unpredictable and engaging reading with the strongest moments leaping out when least expected.

After the opening poems of ‘Contemporary References’, the second section, ‘Psalms’, introduces a more speculative, religious mood. There is a density of meaning here that, with patience, yields up insight:

... Our prayers
cling to our fingers like seedlings
unbearably numbing our touch.
‘Give ...’ but that word at once
invalidates what it utters. ‘Take’
but what use has a source
for what is returned to it.

From earth we move heavenwards to snow – a recurrent image in Richard Allen’s latest collection and a fitting emblem for his poetry. Crystallised fragments of language, frosty, pristine and otherworldly, melt as they fall suspended in space. To the Ocean is a collection of such stillborn fragments, delicately arranged on the page.

Looking for some kind of context, I remembered Charlie Olson and the objectivist poets from the 1950s (‘A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it’; ‘One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception’). Such ideas found their way into popular culture via Bob Dylan and Patti Smith in lyrics that blend grim surrealism with semantic shock tactics. Here the greatest fear is that language might fall back into familiar patterns and so every effort is made to constantly keep it in check and to break it up the moment it starts to take on a particular meaning.

This restraint is exhausting for the reader who is left with restless sequences of shifting images spun out in short, incantatory lines. Surprisingly, the images in this collection are frequently uninteresting and the language bland. Elsewhere, the unyielding control over language is suggested in images of physical and sexual violence. In the section ‘The Laughing Ceases’ one finds lines such as ‘I took his skull and cracked it with my bare hands’ and ‘hooked to the trees / a curtain of white bodies’. Dark impulses indeed, reminiscent of Lautreamont, but the lines no longer contain the energy to shock. Other passages portray the poet as outcast (in the manner of Rimbaud) and this posturing, too, is outmoded.

In ‘Scheherazade’, Allen adopts a more narrative approach, presenting fractured histories embedded in a poetic mosaic. This story of nonstories zooms breathlessly through drifts of short lines, churning up names, places and disjointed events. He aims to strike with lines such as these:

I have come to burn down Plato’s house
I want breakfast
for the cornflakes of my mind

I must admit, however, that found the collection as a whole unchallenging.

Simon Patton is writing a thesis on modern Chinese poetry.