All of the poems on the right side of the page are called ‘The World’s Yard’. They are small prose blocks with a justified blade-sharp right margin, little rectangles. The first line of each of these poems is ‘Right at the back of the world’s yard I am sitting’.

To give you a taste of the book’s blood meridian, either side of the spine we have corpses, splinters, mourners, guns, skulls, guts, surgeons – and dirty pissing angels with steel-capped boots. It’s treacherous ground for original poetry, but, in Cronin’s steady, often lyrical hands, there’s nothing quite familiar: little surgeries performed on the Cubism of a real god’s nihilism.

‘Then lightning, as it comes to art.’ That’s the final line of a poem that includes: ‘Carnivorous / laughter filters through the woods’. I read ‘Carnivorous’ as coronavirus. This book was an eerie read during lockdown. Perhaps it’s the night’s new silence (at times, Cronin’s horror is disarmingly gentle) and the space for a mind returning to a furrow in the middle of the night. Cronin constructs a collective nightmare, and ‘God is the unavoidable text. “R” might be the / dog letter, trilling on the tip of my tongue but the letter / for god is thrilling. It’s all about oath. And how what you / say can kill you.’

Over the course of two hundred pages, the poems thicken with intertextuality. There are fifty-three endnotes referencing poets and thinkers. Via Barbara Wright, Raymond Queneau’s repetitive exploration of the same scene in Exercises in Style is an apt parallel. Elsewhere the surrealist legacy, via Luis Buñuel, is conjured or re-shot, in images such as ‘a juggler who tosses then swallows an eyeball with / stitches’ or ‘little black ants’ that act like heads of a typewriter.

I joked to myself about Un Chat Australien as an alternative title for the collection, but, although several of the first-person poems sit in a local domestic landscape, there’s a universal hum to them. They undeniably, disturbingly, share a truth with the violence (particularly towards women) underwriting recent history; the book’s pertinence is terrifying.

Element: Element: The atomic weight & radius of love by Jordie Albiston

Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 70 pp

Emerging from these heavy shadows, the opening of Albiston’s Element: The atomic weight & radius of love reads free and skipping. She has a nimble sense of the poem’s sounds in sync with the words’ rhythms, the vocal cords engaged from the lips to the curled licks of the tongue on teeth, to clicks at the back of the throat. Here is part of the first poem, ‘hydrogen’:

Kororoit Creek becomes one with the cloud  above Bass Strait & Cherry Lake
& the place where we combine  you are in everything everywhere  the sun
consumes you as you consume me  600 million tons per moment  day day
night

Syntax in orbit, flaring, softening.

The two-stanza poems of Element follow the periodic table. The first letter of each poem is the abbreviated element, followed by an em-dash and a free-associated direction such as ‘H—ome’, or, as in the ‘sulphur’ poem, ‘S—ilvia Plath said …’

Shorter, left-aligned openings to each poem have the same number of words as the element’s atomic weight (e.g. H = 1). Beneath this, an indented stanza has the same number of words as the element’s radius (H = 53). With expanding weight and radius, the poem’s content extends beyond the chemistry of one relationship; Albiston circles the encyclopedia, from Melbourne to the outer galaxy, to tell (not unlike Cronin) the often violent story of history.

I was nervous when I read the second line of ‘hydrogen’: ‘stars shine only because of you’, but Albiston, who is one of the most technically adept poets in the country, knows what she is doing, and she follows the familiar with the brilliance of ‘transmuting yourself into always and light’.

A further formal layer is applied to the poems by an intricate, no-doubt precise (but unsolvable), internal rhythm. When a more overt rhythm is paired with strong internal rhymes, it gives the poems a distracting, almost Seussian galumphing: ‘churches and houses the crossroad between / no dirty no dead   think cosmic-ray-spallation instead … think / Silly Putty … think happiness things … a cheap Pyrex rock in / a cheap chintzy ring.’ Elsewhere, the beat is restrained, as in the twenty-first poem ‘scandium’ (weight = 44, radius = 144). The poem’s language – ‘soft halide arcs sweep up’ – glitters towards the finale: ‘moving in me … swaying with me in nuclear spin / inventing this moment of love & decay … everything’s a symbol’. What a musical exit-gallop!

Family Trees by Michael Farrell

Giramondo, $24 pb, 128 pp

Albiston’s poem displays a confidence to connect jittery fragments, which is a key part of Michael Farrell’s performance over five full-length collections. The poems in his latest one, Family Trees, contain his usual crackling wit and punning Australiana oddity: ‘Goannas flow upwards and across our communal vision / like r’n’b heroines.’ He rinses idiom and pop culture with a queer-eyed urbanity. Cringe, as always with Farrell, has an entirely new sound.

The poem ‘Acts’ works like a series of headlines. Listen to this, I said to my partner, one evening:

Poem ‘Mosquitoes should be left in peace’ wins pub
slam. No other entries allowed on fear of crop death
Moon’s face on wanted poster. Honey for sale sign
by burrow. Koala on chain gang for peppermint theft

Unemployed poet wears tracking device in bush …
… Currawong writes poem, signs it The Kookaburra

There is a powerful melancholy and seriousness in these funny, crafted poems. What to do with the pervasive Australian culture in the face of one’s erudition and its associated isms? Farrell, who grew up in country New South Wales, isn’t dismissive, is empathetic, ‘a / conduit of something that’s almost / a sorrow, a feeling of mercy’ (from ‘Avec Merci’).

More so than in his previous collections, Farrell conceals some of his language hijinks in seemingly traditional forms: several four- and five-line stanza poems. His sestina, for example, slyly reinterprets the traditions back to front, as if classical music spun backwards or ‘a hybrid cheese that / Melts at the sound of Ravel’.

I noticed something else new in Family Trees: dexterous cinematic – or is it novelistic? – detail. In one poem: ‘The plan is for all poets to double themselves, turn up to / the party in pairs and scare the novelists.’ On reading the following gorgeous sequence, those novelists would surely quiver in their boots: ‘We always called movies vehicles. “Are / you going to the Streep vehicle?” our mother would / call, hearing us lifting our coats from the rack in the hall.’