For many readers such anguish, or something loosely analogous, will not be unfamiliar. There may therefore be a limit to how often they want the issue raised. In his acknowledgments, Tredinnick shows he is aware of the dangers involved: ‘This is not a memoir. These poems are the sense that poetry could help one human make of a great sadness, “that rust upon the soul”, as Samuel Johnson puts it, that came his way with the end of a marriage and the fracture of a family.’ Later he adds: ‘Things are much better now for them, and me, but there were hard times and they deserve this witness.’

The poems embodying this witnessing are arranged in four parts with a one-poem prologue and epilogue. Sections 1 and 2, ‘Pavane’ and ‘On Dusk’, plumb the depths. Sections 3 and 4, ‘Four Rooms’ and ‘First Light’, show the incremental exit from the impasse. It’s affecting to see how small some of these steps could be.

Most of the poems here, understandably, have an acute poignancy, one of the most distressing being ‘A Boy, One Afternoon’. In it the poet remembers one of his sons walking past him without acknowledgment after school in ‘the silent creed he’d been / Recruited to ...  / his hand-me-down rage his own for now.’

A complementary sense of what the poet is missing is vividly found in ‘Talking Death Down’, where the poet recalls ‘when winds buffeted / The car, I sat with my daughter and read with her, // Scout and Atticus again. If that’s / Not life then life’s not worth a single phrase.’ The poem ends: ‘Turns out my children / Love me, though I’ve made it hard. Their courage // Warrants my life in return. Joy comes. I tell / The morning this, and morning carries on.’

A few readers may find a sentence like ‘Joy comes’ sentimental and the personification of ‘morning’ a little excessive. Nevertheless, the final phrase, ‘and morning carries on’, does provide something of an antidote, and is more than true to the patience demanded in the situation.

The Mirror Hurlers, Ross Gillett’s third collection, is the product of ten years’ work. (The title poem was shortlisted for the 2019 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.) Its opening and closing sections are packed with poems that simultaneously challenge and entertain and do indeed have the three qualities claimed for them in the back-cover blurb: ‘intensity, complexity and clarity’.

The middle group, by contrast, is something of a miscellany with the poet inclined to reach for difficult objectives that can sometimes elude him. There are a few love poems here, though ‘jealousy poems’ might be a better term. The most memorable work in the section is probably ‘Istán and Other Places’, an eight-page quest poem set mainly in southern Spain. It has a striking, somewhat surreal geography and a powerful sense of history. ‘Where are you now in the inexplicable / republics, those satellite dependencies // with their cold check points / further north than anywhere I’ve been. // I see you walking the stormed streets, / the wrecked squares. A mist // of tear gas, the whiff of history / stinging your eyes.’

Images like these foreshadow the fabulist impress of central European poets such as Miroslav Holub, Zbigniew Herbert, and Vasko Popa in the book’s final section. Its opening poem, ‘Finding Poetry’, is an index to the pleasures that follow: ‘Go to the bravest shelves. / Let your fingers climb the alphabetical cliffs. / Put your head on sideways to read the narrow titles.’ The poem concludes a few lines later with: ‘How will you get through the day // with this rearrangement of yourself. / Your upside-down mind, / your translated heart.’

The Mirror Hurlers ends with a rush of clever, playful poems that also contrive to be moving in their own idiosyncratic way. Among the most memorable is the title sequence ‘Thirteen Ways of Thinking about a Chainsaw’. It bears little resemblance to the Wallace Stevens’s archetype, but is jokily disturbing nonetheless. Here’s one ‘way’. ‘Never take a chainsaw out while drunk. / You might ask it to dance.’

In a very different mood, there is also a putative suicide note, ‘Apology’, an effortlessly rhyming sonnet, as seen here in its opening quatrain: ‘I cannot make it. I hope it all goes well. / The life you plan to have sounds interesting, / although I must admit it’s hard to tell / these days, what with the world and everything.’

The Mirror Hurlers ends with a suitably airy nine-part sequence, ‘Buying Online’, which turns around the joys of buying poetry on the net, then seeing what turns up – and in what condition. Don’t be upset, the poet suggests, if your book is water-damaged: ‘Think of the weather wanting to get to the poem, / the rain being interested enough.’

It’s a nice foreshadowing of the sequence’s final poem that neatly, and ironically, ends the book: ‘They are spindrift words. / They hang back / from the main point ... // Feel their faint rain, / thoughts that fade as they hit you.’

In addition to all this, there’s the opening section of The Mirror Hurlers, a light-hearted and observant recollection of childhood, rather in the manner of early Bruce Dawe. It, too, is a pleasure not to be missed.

Correction

An earlier version of this review contained two inaccurate quotes from Ross Gillett’s The Mirror Hurlers. The quote ‘How will you get through the day // with this rearrangement of yourself.’ should have read ‘How will you get through the day // with this rearranged version of yourself.’ The quote ‘Think of the weather wanting to get into the poem’ should have read ‘Think of the weather wanting to get to the poem’. These errors have now been corrected.