For Poussard, the Centre represents the interior space (the unconscious) of the Australian psyche. We do not think about it much but cannot fail to be surprised that when explored we find American bases, history, and culture in its landscape. So, the poems record not only physical and geographic exploration, but also that self-exploration needed to form political consciousness.

Her style of writing is dramatically simple and I would be tempted to describe it as journalistic if that could not be taken as an insult. As a result the images of her poetry never seem (and, of course, are not) invented: simple statement depicts political action with photographic clarity.

The book contains only fourteen poems but there is also a diary, fascinating in its own right, and it is interesting to compare its entries with the poems. The entry for 11 November reads, in part: ‘Nancy makes a good speech. She says Pine Gap is a symbol of global violence, violence against the poor, against women and against the planet.’ In the poem ‘November 11th’ the symbol works itself out:

Now we are come
to the centre of the country and ourselves.
We come to mourn
violence against the poor …
This place, Pine Gap,
is at the Centre, but does not
belong to us,
having nothing to do with life.
Here, in a place of death,
remembering future wars
we break the silence.

Judith Rodriguez wrote the foreword to Outbreak of Peace and says it ‘is part of the vital material of our times’. Yes. It is a quietly important book which, unfortunately, may not get the attention it deserves.

In stark contrast with Poussard’s political poetry, Neilsen’s, and O’Donohue’s We’ll all go together: nuclear poems (Queensland Community Press, $15, $8 pb, 72 pp) is flawed by having so large a subject and too little relevant material with which to draw it out. Many of the poems (though quite interesting in themselves) seem quite irrelevant to the issue of the nuclear arms race with which the book purports to deal. ‘Flt. Sgt. Robert Wilhams’, ‘Coming Home’, and ‘Dingoes’, all by Neilsen, will put a strain on most readers who may ask why these poems have been included.

To some extent the problem of relevance is covered by the authors’ intention to ‘deal not only with the nuclear threat, but also with the cultural and historical background to the issues’. This means, in effect, that anything goes and that as a political and historical commentary it is rather slap-dash. In Outbreak of Peace American history and culture blend with Australian landscape as unnaturally (and yet appropriately) as the radomes of Pine Gap. Outbreak is in focus, cogent in its array of images; We’ll all go together quite simply does not gel.

There are, however, several very good poems. Neilsen’s ‘Starlings’ is at once very beautiful and sinister. An ordinary event becomes metaphor of catastrophe:

the evil giant,
rising at dawn from the moist earth
snapped its cobweb chains
and found no one watching from the trees.
Listen. The last trees are falling:
there is a noise in the kitchen,
starlings burst from the cupboard,
the tides are turned back
as the bee crawls across the sun.

The first few poems in O’Donohue’s section of the book draw effectively on the experience of his service in Vietnam; those poems and ‘Visiting an Art Gallery’ and ‘Congresbury England’ are all excellent and on target of the book’s aims. O’Donohue is on the whole more successful and consistently to the point than Neilsen.

At the Institute for Total Recall (Queensland Community press, $15, $8 pb, 62 pp) is Michael Sariban’s first book. There are some interesting poems, ‘Fairy Tales’ and ‘Sign Language Class’, amongst others, which stand above the rest of the contents mainly because of their completeness and strong closures. ‘Sign Language Class’ is worth quoting:

‘Me’ and ‘mine’ require a body contact
almost narcissistic, and some so
awkward with it, it seems a self-
discovery. Abstract words
are more demanding still.

For ‘future’ the hands
unfold quite gently,
without a trace of irony.

When Sariban is not attentive to his own capacity for clarity the poems collapse under weight of unnecessary rhetorical figures, and adjectives. One poem, ‘Proxies’, could very well have been about Sariban’s own method of writing:

the action has shrunk
from an abundance of space to a sandpit
propping up a festival, the elaborate
working out of a simple equation …
in all, a baffling absence
of direct rage

This would seem to be an absence in Sariban’s poetry, not always at fault though in some poems (e.g., ‘A Drowning’ and ‘American Summer’) representing, perhaps, an inability to bring his work to a satisfying conclusion.

Sariban’s poems are most interesting when least cluttered and there is an adequate number of these to expect that, with better editing, his second book will be an improvement.

I suspect many readers will find it odd for me to comment that Andrew McDonald is a poet for whom language is central: how can language not be central to a poet’s concerns? I mean to emphasise, as Jacque Lacan wrote of the psychoanalyst, that McDonald’s ‘realm of truth is in fact the word … his whole experience must find in the word alone its instrument, its framework, and even the static of its uncertainties’. This special awareness of language is not unusual amongst good writers, who understand it means more than imitating James Joyce. The epigraph to The One True History (Hale & Iremonger, $15.95, $7.95 pb, 96 pp). ‘Language ah now you have me’, indicates an attitude of writing and, I suspect, issues a challenge to have fun.

Though I think it is true that McDonald does not have the verbal brilliancy of Tranter, there is enough of this mixed with a kind wit to make reading his poetry a lively experience, and it is of a consistently high standard for a book of ninety-three pages. There are a few lapses (‘Newtown’, Passing Through’, ‘Stops’, ‘Reading’), fortunately not so weak to be too distracting, only boring compared to the best he can offer.

The poems are varied in form and temper almost to the point that it is useless to speak of McDonald having a distinctive voice. The book contains beautiful lyrics (‘Stockton Beach’, ‘Out of My Depth’), several very good performance poems, and a sequence of twenty punchy, smart poems under the heading ‘Chorus’. Two quotes will show something of his versatility. First, from ‘Out of My Depth’:

Halfway to threescore and ten,
I’m clearly a marked man, can feel
a sharp wind slicing close to the bone …

in the teeth of a carnivorous rip that drags me winded out to each /
and the next / and next repeating breaker
that rolls and heaves like death the green leviathan
surfacing to greet this Ishmael, wild and wooping as a boy

In ‘Chorus’, often pseudo-philosophical but always sparkling, McDonald finishes the book off energetically:

Phenomenology,
help me!
I’m paralysed and adrift,
landlubbered in the

hoary, sloppy embrace of
amorous words. Oh slime, oh
my god it’s great!
Massage-parlour of the thesaurus, the
incense of choplogic quite o’ercrows my spirit.

Artwork on the cover of The One True History is by Josef Stejskal and it is excellent.

Three of the four books reviewed here were published with the assistance of the – Literature Board and the same three are all available in hardcover at an exorbitant cost.