This won’t be the first review (or the last) to compare the poetry of Coleman to that of John Forbes, whose biography he is currently writing. Forbes’s influence can be felt in Coleman’s fascination with not only Pop Art’s cartoon aesthetic (‘Cartoon Snow’) but also with electronic gadgetry. When, in the second of Coleman’s ‘Secondary’ poems (each one an improvisation on a secondary colour: green, purple, orange), we come across ‘A tang / of primitive electronics: the circuit board’s / braille labyrinth, the slab type / of Amstrad’ (a brand of personal computer), we see the complexity of Coleman’s negotiation of Forbes’s legacy. The evocation of an almost instinctively sensual recognition – ‘a tang’ – makes all the difference. In Forbes, everything is artificial and contrived (mechanically or ideologically); his density of allusion and detached hedonism squeeze all the phenomenal pungency out of experience. Yet this element remains undiluted in Coleman’s work, even when something like the incursions on the human sensorium by commodity culture is being implied (‘lungs scoured / by Brillo air’).

Coleman has recently reflected on his desire to compose what he calls an ‘omnivorous lyric’, and throughout this collection one detects the ongoing experiment of marrying a looser associative method to the poet’s natural feel for taut, concise lyric forms (still evident in the short parenthood poems ‘Unready’, ‘Regent & Seal’, and ‘But Soft’). The latter is where Coleman seems most at home, and home, as he writes in ‘Quest’, ‘is the place to exercise / your subtlety’. As his poems range ever more freely and adventurously across the zodiac of his own wit, they continue to register the centripetal pull of intimate enclosures, whether poetic or domestic.

Navigable Ink by Jennifer McKenzie

Transit Lounge, $24 pb, 80 pp

Where Coleman’s volume traverses ‘the vast, blue continent of theory’, Jennifer Mackenzie’s work roams through the jungles and grasslands of Southeast Asia. Navigable Ink emerges from Mackenzie’s decades-long engagement with Indonesia and its writers, especially the novelist and essayist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, whose manuscript for the historical epic Arus Balik (a ‘reversal’ or ‘turning of the tide’) found its way into Mackenzie’s hands in 1993. Almost all the poems in this collection are inspired by or allude to Arus Balik (one poem, ‘Malacca’, is a direct translation), making Navigable Ink something of a prolegomenon to Pramoedya’s monumental work.

Yet this is a book of formidable learning – historical, cultural, philological – in its own right. You will want to read it with a dictionary and encyclopedia or search engine at hand; you will probably want to go back to it after watching Jalan Raya Pos (‘The Great Post Road’), Bernie IJdis’s 1996 documentary about the road that slinks across the top of Java, a project commissioned by the Dutch and completed using forced labour that killed thousands. While there is clearly an activist dimension to Mackenzie’s work, it consists less, I think, in the stridency of the poems’ stances against censorship and environmental devastation, and more in the cross-cultural networks of artists and scholars these poems call into being through their acts of dedication and citation.

Navigable Ink presents some of Mackenzie’s most vivid historical reconstructions. But unlike Borobudur (2009), a collection that follows the wayfaring Gunavarman, the priestly architect of the sacred Buddhist site, this latest collection presents the reader with no clear protagonists to follow, no central narrative braid to clutch. Instead, the fractal eloquence of Mackenzie’s poems and images branches out from an oeuvre obscured by years of censorship under the old colonial regime and Suharto’s New Order. In the sequence of poems that reflect on Pramoedya’s life in letters, Mackenzie’s clipped and almost telegraphic idiom suggests the precariousness of a vocation facing multitudinous forms of world-historical blockage (‘1965: / I. Library Ransacked / II. hysteria of flags / III. discourse a burning tyre / IV. imprisonment to the East’). Yet it is a vocation which persists, even at the extremity of deprivation, as a wager on eternity (‘typing onto the blank pages of the future, the text / wrapped in the / bottle / & out to sea / to history / to ETERNITY’).

A Happening in Hades by Stephen K. Kelen

Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 96 pp

Just as Mackenzie’s recreations of sixteenth-century Indo nesia allow for time travelling, the poems in Stephen K. Kelen’s A Happening in Hades address a future populated by drones, high-definition screens, and ‘a vast coelenterate’ (i.e. jellyfish) – ‘a giant wobbling freak god, translucent and full of movement and light’ filling up the empty seabeds. Of the three poets, Kelen has arguably the greatest range: his poems plough a number of disparate furrows, from Australiana (‘The Great Australian Noun’) to Byromania (‘Don Juan Enters the Underworld’), canine capers (‘Dog Day’) to confessional disclosures (‘Packing Up the House’), the koanic (‘Cold winds blow from angry hearts’) to the corybantic (‘Anaheim’s street dogs barked rock / and roll all night’).

This, then, is ‘omnivorous’ verse of another stripe, more commonly known under the sign of ‘mock’. Despite its origin in patrician literary practices, mock has a levelling effect, allowing the high to get a sniff of the low in all matters political and poetical. The residues of mock are everywhere to be seen in Kelen’s book, from a title that conflates the contemporary with the Classical in its evocation of Hades (a tactic deployed by T.S. Eliot, Shelley, and Pope, among others) to the casual raillery of literati and poetasters in poems such as ‘Empire of the Scene’, ‘Floating World’, and ‘Bush Town’ (‘Verse once so strictly equestrian had become bovine’). It’s even there in some of the gentler moments of domestic felicity that lionise the mundane: ‘Empty the mind – / exalt the profound kitchen, / wash the dishes transcendence’.

But the mock strain becomes most explicit in the three Don Juan poems that conclude the book. The libertine protagonist of Byron’s mock-epic is reimagined as ‘a happy mongrel / (Family background tick multicultural)’ prone to the seductions not of women so much as of consumerism. Indeed, shopping malls serve as Kelen’s analogues for the slave markets in Byron’s original. The disavowal of comic rhymes is disappointing in this context (what’s the fun of imitating Byron if you won’t pair ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’?), but the doggerel is convincing, especially in the first ‘draft’ poem. While it is the only one of the three not arranged in stanzas, it romps along more merrily than its strophic counterparts, marred only occasionally by a note of sententiousness (‘Not everywhere’s a mall, outside there’s a world / Incredibly sad … / Where children search for shrapnel to sell for scrap’).

There are rival mock lineages in Australian poetry: on the one hand, the stately neo-Classical satires of A.D. Hope and Peter Porter; on the other, a more larrikin Augustan tradition that extends from a colonial poet such as John Dunmore Lang to a contemporary such as Justin Clemens. Kelen belongs firmly in the latter camp; he keeps its rambunctious spirit of wit alive even as he despairs of poetry’s ability to compete with television, video games, or the pub for time and attention. But declaring ‘GAME OVER’ is a timeworn move in mock’s repertoire. As every gamer knows, that screen only appears when the story isn’t quite done.