His poetry is determinedly laconic. Despite a conventional appearance he is in a sense an extreme poet who has forced colloquialism as far as it can go. It is not the rich bower bird accumulation of dialects we are familiar with from Bruce Dawe but a particular quasi-intellectual stance towards the world: we cannot assert too much. It is a type of uncertainty principle. A typical list of introductory phrases, usually strategically at the end of poems includes: ‘I suppose… ’, ‘Probably… ’, ‘Almost as if… ’, ‘I wonder whether… ’, ‘Sometimes…’. Whilst this forthright avoidance of assertion can allow him to build a poem to a strong muted conclusion, as in ‘1815’, a poem about Governor Macquarie:

Fancy giving a man charge of a prison
who hates walls, who loathes barriers,

it can sometimes have the contrary effect of bleaching an ending of the colour it needs.

His poems also usually employ a discursive introduction. Allied with his laconicism his dismissiveness can occasionally leave him with a poem that trails away before it has properly begun. But when these characteristic moves of his verse come together as intended his poetry has a fine casual beauty. ‘Honey and Myrtle’ and ‘Deja Vu, Almost’ have a brilliance we are surprised we have noticed.

Cornelis Vleeskens’s The Day The River is an attractive book. He writes a relaxed poetry, a line of careful but not deep thought. The problems for his style of poetry can be seen in his own description of it in ‘Night Driving’: ‘the searched-out words slap-happy on the page’. It is not an attitude to the work that immediately endears us to the seriousness of what he has to say.

The general effect of a poem tends to be that it is pleasant but not memorable. Individual lines are neither rich nor tight enough. Yet the book remains attractive because of the sense of the character of the author that emerges. It is an overall effect rather than the effect of individual poems. The book itself is well organised; largely autobiographical, it proceeds through the Vleeskens’ family migration to Australia and recollections of childhood in Holland, through Sydney regionalism to the rural regionalism of Queensland. This last section contains some Snyder-like poems but also a number of interesting historical recreations of the inner migration of Australia that intelligently use the language of official reports and yet remain an aspect of Vleeskens’s own personality. The book is beautifully designed, using a print of Jenni Mitchell’s on the cover.

Doris Brett’s first collection, The truth about unicorns, is overwhelmingly about sexual desire. Because her free verse lines are too lax to allow sensuousness to operate within them she is forced to rely on imagery or mythopoesis. Her imagery presents a philosophical problem. When she looks at an object it is so implicated in sexual need it ceases to exist in its own right. Her desire dissolves the real world.

Her mythopoesis usually takes the form of the retelling of a fairy tale. In the title poem and the pithy ‘Alice’ her sexual matter is precisely conveyed. In other retellings the original looms larger than her versions. The best poems in the book are those in which sex is not the abiding presence, poems about anxiety and the wonderful feminist poem ‘Play Group’ where the women gathered in a circle watching children play effortlessly becomes a tribal occasion. It is much finer than her mythic strivings. As a number of her poems show, Doris Brett can be a sparkling poet.