A common source of inspiration is a country childhood. Those who enjoyed Joyce Lee’s knowledge and recollections of farm-life in the Wimmera, will find extra poems in this vein as well as some reprinted. ‘Double Wedding’, ‘Miss Dimsey’ (there are several on country schools), ‘Portland’ (beach holidays), ‘Minna in My Grandmother’s Kitchen’, ‘The Past Walks Noiselessly’, and ‘Dreams for Wheat’ – all of these have the sure touch of experience, both in facts and tone.

The surprising richness of this collection comes from the poet’s awareness of her many doppelgangers, who spring from niches of history or intense dilemmas of sympathy and recognition. Not only, in ‘Prisoner’, are such victims as Margaret Clitherow and Catherine of Aragon called to speak; Lee speaks from her experience of their lives, and announces in her last piece

myself the composite of friends …
My body left, I know I’ll return …
I’m solid on earth
alive by its dead,
mountains, branches, bones …
I reach an arm’s span
all in me touches all out there

‘End No End’

It is this conviction that fills her condensed and highly original sequence ‘Miriol’, that perfects the nightmare Siberian train trip with the compartment ‘packed with cuts of marrow’:

I wail and rail to the guard
and windows full of heads,
about the late occupant’s
filthy habits,
knowing as I shout
the wholy squashy lot is mine.

‘Collector’s Item’

From its position of strength, she is able not just to be a witch (‘Witch and Partner’), but to give an air of freshness and knowledge, an ages-spanning perspective, to third-person accounts – ‘Heir to a Barbarian’, ‘The Dig’. In this collection, the sudden enlargement of scope gives hope of further exciting developments – as well as producing a number of remarkable poems.

Reading Barbara Giles’ poems about different regions of Victoria – mostly difficult country with struggling farmers – I recognise the self-analysis of an anecdotal poem, ‘Sunday Morning Walking with My Father’:

My father taught us earth,
in the aggregate rocks
the beginnings of history.
On Sunday mornings there were never people,
these were encountered later,
difficult to study, hard to classify.

It is the process that takes Giles’s observant eye, the way trees, earth, and finally water are short-sightedly wasted or discouraged, till people can’t live there. She must have been a good pupil; here exposition is systematic and inexorable. But she has a bright eye for detail, knows her people and flora, and gives us a moment of bitterly impractical vision:

      The wife goes to work
to keep an extortionate vision,
      their heads above water,
who would perhaps drown
      without these airs, these skies,
those distant mountains.

‘A View of the Promontory’

The final poem in her A Land section is, unexpectedly, a concrete poem – a beauty. ‘Levelling’ starts

My hill

is running

down

hill

each time

it rains

and manages a fine mix of wit and message, along with its eye-seducing ease.

At this point it might be asked, who else is on about country Victoria? Places need poets, as compilers of locality picture­books would agree; and no doubt the territory is crammed with phrases and names, but – at this moment? Giles and Joyce between them cover a lot of ground where few poets are competing.

Giles’s second section, ‘A Solitude of People’, ventures into the later preoccupation ‘difficult of study’. People bring the poet to one (and sometimes both) of two moods: a concerned seriousness, and a carefully-whetted irony. ‘Chris: her green fingers’ is a graceful recognition of friendship; in a vein approaching agony. ‘I call upon angels’ asks a blessing on a dying man and ‘My son, my son’ rehearses the vision of war and death. But a quite distinctive charm radiates from simply humorous poems – ‘Morning Song’, a farming aubade, ‘Habitat’ or ‘Living alone is living alone is living’; and from the slightly barbed ‘This being so’ and the self-righteous account of a despised strong-willed girl in ‘Do I Mean What I'm Saying?’ that ends

Just think of the dancing we’ve done …
and the world wags on in a springtime
      way and nobody, nobody’s grieving.

Being of an age to write ‘Seventh Decade Summer’, Barbara Giles turns experience to tactical advantage. Though younger writers might face the threat of the mirrors with

Then wait and be damned. Do I care?
My life’s full as an egg. What’s a mirror
                                                       to me?

‘Come to Grief’

Giles’s ‘Reading an Erotic Novel at a Late Age’ is beyond them. A gluttonously joyful poem, from a book of varied delights.

It ought to be noted that co-operative publication includes the availability of editorial advice; these books have profited. Square-spined and glossy-covered, with monochrome colour landscape photo, they are a credit to Pariah.

Pi O, resolutely urban, in Re: The National Neurosis: Ockers (Box 2430 V, G.P.O. 3001. 24 p.) does a re-run of the 70s, with emphasis on the media and politics. One set of figures outshoots twenty facts expressed any other way, and Pi can be relied upon to give some good ones:

the meat pie

still had to be eaten

(or sucked)

leaning forward

    at an angle of

55°

    … the

French were

‘bastards’, &

true-blue-dinki-di Aussies were still

300% Irish convicts.

However, this is more than a string of jokes or even news-items. The ‘rise and fall of the Ocker’ traces Hoges’ influence and commercial transformations; stabs are delivered to Barry Humphries, Life. Be In It, and a Liberal Party electoral campaign; and the deterioration of one Neil is followed through variants of drunken bashings – wogs, women, etc. – till the poet himself beseeches, ‘how do i become an Ocker?’ and ten initiatory feats are detailed to end the poem and nail the Ocker in all his crudeness, laziness, and xenophobia.

For anyone who hasn’t heard ‘rijidij’ lately and feels there’s not enough meat-pie juice running down ocker forearms these days, this is a treasury of nostalgia, of Aussie-ethnic phraseology, and pointed, cheeky, bouncy verse. But only a cassette could spout forth the true Pi-O-ian spring.