I put it all away for a while. When I picked it up again, having cleared my mind of expectations, something seemed to have happened, something was happening. He is trying something new for him, letting himself wander at will, imposing no structure other than the concept of alternating fiction and sermon. Here what you see is what you’ve got. So much of recent poetry is tight, packed layer upon layer of meaning, a large, loose-blowsy poem like The Most Beautiful World is an oddity. He’s not trying to be ‘poetic’, though being an old hand (this is his tenth book of poetry) his verse runs easily – there are odd juxtapositions of events, of subject matter. Odd choices – but not very odd, possibly not extraordinary enough, nor simple enough. It’s a difficult task being oracular when every cause is proclaimed in the media, on T shirts, and car stickers to an ungrateful audience.

But it’s what Rodney Hall wanted to do and he did it to his own prescription, interesting in its difference. Freedom is one of his prescribed items.

In Vivian Smith, we have a poet of a very different kind. He early settled on a mode which he was easy in and has continued to write elegant, lyrical verse, carefully wrought and varied in content, in masterly fashion. He can, however, write colloquially with success. This volume shows again his meditative cast, his human sympathies, his control of chosen form. Here is a poet at ease with rhyme, who makes it sing, as in Summer Rain, where with only three rhymes and a deliberately restricted vocabulary of both word and image, he makes rich and musical verse which displays its artfulness only on close examination.

The same examination will reveal assonances, half rhymes, overtones, in this verse both subtle and assured. But never effect for effect’s sake; I use his own lines:

In praise of clarity the winds
blow ...
and shake the pear tree free of
snow ...
oh winter at the heart of praise.

There are many memorable lines here, ‘The patient strictness of the dew’; the perfect description for winter light, ‘astringent and serene’: boulders ‘watching for river beds’.

The book closes with a section of translations and variations, where Vivian Smith shows his skills in another and demanding aspect of the poet’s art. Assuming the forms and the styles of his various models he escapes the trap of the translator, that of using the idea without the breath of the poem, the voice of the writer.

This book brings together some poems from an earlier volume, and some unpublished early poems, as well as mature work, thus showing the poet’s full range and present directions, his recent experiments with form and tone.

Let the poet have the last word:

Let candour be your guide
and may your words rejoice
in art's only reward,
to speak in one's own voice.

Jill Hellyer’s Song of the Humpback Whales has been ignored by reviewers in general, who, I notice, are inclined to draw away when faced by irony and restraint, and find cries de coeur, intellectual high jinks, or sexual joys and agonies easier to deal with.

This small collection, which includes six poems from an earlier book, displays Jill Hellyer as a compassionate and intelligent poet, a good craftsman.

The title poem, Whales, uses the whales’ wandering existence as a beautifully sustained simile for our own, and sets the tone for the book, compassionate, intense, and rather melancholy, but entirely unsentimental.

they flow
as we ourselves in terrible
formation,
trapped each a lifetime in
compelling seas.

There are exquisite phrases in this poem: ‘green-scarped waves’, ‘the spatial music of gulls’, the whale’s voices – ‘soft indigo explosion’.

Human speech, however, can be dangerous. In He Meant Well, a voice prises open ‘our core of serenity’, in another the voice is a scalpel. Most of the poems spring from significant experiences in the poet’s life, transmuted rather than recounted, entirely without self-pity. A quirky humour surfaces in poems like Jonah, in which the wife unkindly disbelieves, in Lot's Wife, satirical in Camellia, where the flower is used as metaphor of the man’s requirements. Other poems are observations of; tributes to people in her life. This poet’s touch is sure, her insights intelligent.

By the time a book comes from the press, it’s already in the past of the poet’s experience. I have found recent work of Gary Catalano reached me more nearly than does Heaven of Rags, as did Remembering the Rural Life, an earlier volume. It appears that his intentions were the same then as now, however. He said:

I’ll never understand
the true poetic art
of writing from the hear ...
I don’t like poems that bruit
the heart’s convulsions ...
The art in poetry
is not, like therapy,
an existential rub.
A poem is not a pub.

This seems to me to place shackles on the poet. Half-joking he may be, but if so the joke is significant, and relates not only to his subject matter, but to his spare (sparse?) form, his usual three to five line verses with two or at the most three stresses. This can come off very well, it can become monotonous, it can be completely unjustified, as in Hope ‘What you must do/is hope each/blow will soften/as the years/plant their/colonies/on your skin’, which is further fragmented by two stanza breaks, and could quite as well have been written in two long lines – or in prose, the lines serving neither to punctuate or to guide the voice, but only to inflate the poem.

Catalano experiments with form in a section of this book devoted to prose poems. This is a difficult form, which must compensate for its solid appearance by a driving long rhythmic forcefulness. Is that apparent here? Geography forecasts change.

A well composed view will imply the wilderness ... Let loose from a formal garden, the self’s like a carnivore escaped from the zoo ... To decry the beast for its raids on outlying farms and to place a bounty on its head, is to lose sight of what it leaves behind: polished bones may be one thing, but what of those tracks at the edge of a musical pool?

Here is evidence of willingness to change, to invite the wilderness he decried earlier?

The section which contemplates his childhood recalls The Rural Life; the poems about his grandparents among the best in the book. Worn by a hard life, ‘they are unbeaten. The grandfather learning to write at sixty-five is ‘pleased to see a new / late shoot / emerging from its seed’. Of the grandmother he says ‘there was nothing / she couldn’t do / with those two hands / of hers’. Catalano finds himself writing from the heart here, and will surely permit us to admire.

The section using the camera as thematic bond contains a fine poem, A Photograph of the Soul. ‘I have paused briefly to return your gaze/before I move into/that world of light/forever behind me’. A subtle metaphor this, yielding more by each contemplation.

We will watch with interest his new directions. We have four poets here with very different intentions, but all with much to offer.