The first section references a range of American poets, borrowing from their confessional poetics to take the reader, powerfully and abruptly, into dark personal territories. As the poet’s husband is wheeled ‘from emergency to theatre’, we experience her shock at the visceral malfunction of the beloved’s body:

My voice is daemonic.
Your larynx contracts at its sound;
                a moan emerges like a ghoul.
You blindly raise your arms, as if possessed by a dream,
                batting at the tube clogging your throat, and at your chest
                where the sternum was sawn apart
                to get to your heart, cowering like a child
                in its enclave of bone.

This confronting experience also ‘triggers’ the speaker into spirals of previous trauma, the ‘pestilence’ of childhood nights controlled by her father: ‘My fear cried out, but my body could not run. / When I came to, it was in a room bruised by stars.’

The haunting nature of this kind of trauma is again alluded to in the Plath-inspired poem ‘Daddy’, where the speaker has become her father’s ‘nocturnal godling, / cut from the flesh of his groin, spilling myself like waste’. It is a triggering that recurs at moments of crisis and fear, and it leads to the re-emergence of depression, paralysis, even dissociation.

Even in poems of the domestic world, Takolander identifies the persistence of darkness: the curtains whose nylon cord is ‘looped like a noose’; the baby monitor that is ‘Valium-white’; the pot plant ‘serene as plastic’. In the section ‘Outside’, the poet plays more overtly with form in her attempts to wrestle with the identifiable threats of the external world. The sequence ‘Haiku for the Anthropocene’ uses both the stanzaic brevity of that form and plant names from the Botanical Gardens in an attempt to map the poles of night and daylight, what is beautiful and what is threatening. Other poems, such as ‘Scenes from a Documentary’, literally tip the text sideways, using the disconcerting disruption of layout, as well as the inclusion of symbols, as placeholders for the surfeit, the onerous burdens that the poems carry, whether it be climate change, sinkholes, radiation, or dementia.

The collection’s final prose poem, ‘On Happiness’, makes explicit the crucial question concerning the relationship between poetic art and suffering. When the poet writes, ‘she herself wondered if language was invented for the sole purpose of expressing pain’, we are given a retrospective key to the entire collection, witnessing Takolander’s impressive capacity to wield language’s almost shamanistic role of eliciting hidden suffering together with the identification of an equally persistent possibility of ‘happiness’. Despite the grim spaces inhabited in these poems, happiness is nevertheless repeatedly sought – in the margins, in the catharses, in the sequencing and crafting of these poetic words.

Rare Bird by James Lucas

Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 76 pp

Rare Bird, James Lucas’s début collection, demonstrates craft refined to an impressive fluency and polish. These are poems that foreground the discipline of craft, reminding us of the ways in which poetic forms – both conventional and experimental, tight and loose – can offer a structure in which a poet might explore, push at the edges, move off into uncharted territory. With their delight in sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, these poems find new ways of housing experience within the architecture of existing forms.

The subject matter of the poems is lively and full of the colour of contemporary life – from art, to parenting, the modern city, cricket, the specificity of place, and the exchanges of perception. The recurring questions of what is looked at, who is doing the looking, and what meanings are made through this dynamic thread through these different poems.

In ‘At Western Plains’, Lucas uses the repetitions and circulatory nature of the villanelle to examine the question of cross-species ‘looking’ and the extent to which it might lead to either radical recognition or a colonising gaze:

When siamang gibbons sing to hold their ground
an air-tight pouch vibrates beneath each chin.
Upright primates gather, marvel at the sound
…
and crowd the moat three deep as vain apes bound
to stand guard every hour of the sun
when siamang gibbons sing to hold their ground.
Upright primates gather, marvel at the sound.

In ‘Jazz’, the poet riffs on the more crystalline and open style of William Carlos Williams in order to accommodate the exploratory voices of music. Lines of poetry here offer a kind of improvisation on the juxtaposition of image and idea – and the production of art that flows from it:

a flying sax
converses with
a sedentary piano,

feeling
for a quickness
under pressure

then ascending
flights of basement stairs
without a landing

The collection’s title poem, ‘Rare Bird’, references the art of John Wolseley, whose work is also used in the cover image. Wolseley’s watercolours, often overlaid with sketchings of charcoal or graphite, evoke the delicacy of Australian landscape and birds. Lucas echoes this visual style with the poem’s ekphrastic searching for the ‘vagrant thought’ that will provide certainty amid the ephemera of perception. The regular metrics of this poem that pull the reader forward are undercut by enjambments that drop us into a flux of uncertainty – as elusive as the rare bird itself, glimpsed in the scrub:

A vagrant thought to which I cannot fix a word
speaks of the soul – too big a stretch? – of search
through properties, blind chases where I catch
a bar of red, white brow or whistled note
…
a vagrant meditation without close
(that bird I thought I saw being long gone)

The Hard Word by Peter Kirkpatrick

Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 91 pp

Peter Kirkpatrick’s third collection, The Hard Word, is the work of a poet, academic, and teacher who has long pursued language’s capacity to illuminate human experience. Sometimes this is done through the shadowing of voices and styles from the literary past, bringing them at least partially into a contemporary cadence. This can be seen in the nod to Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti: ‘Should I bring her flowers, or will this weather do? / Whatever. Let’s give spring a big, warm welcome / as she unpacks her catwalk glamour’; or the humorous ventriloquising of Donne in the salacious poem ‘Lucking It’:

O lucky soap…
shortly to go above, below, within
her sturdy grip;
to slip and dip
between the gaps, or feel her probing grope:
O lucky, lucky soap.

There are also some powerful insights into the dynamics of the classroom, the moments when a student’s words can make ‘the heavy weight of hours lift, / just like a sudden drawing up of blinds’. For those of us committed to words and their mercurial capacity to broaden the perceptions of others, it’s exciting to see this ‘unpredictive chemistry of teaching’ brought so thoughtfully into the spotlight of poetic consideration.

Perhaps Kirkpatrick’s most powerful work is in relation to the visceral experience of love – that always ‘hard word’. While there are poems of heady sensuality, it is the more reflective poems of mature love that carry the most emotional heft. As Kirkpatrick writes in ‘The Bad News’, although ‘my silk has turned to flannelette, / my floating hair to thinning thatch’, the gift of love seems nevertheless to endure, whether by intention or accident. The half-sleep connection of the long-lovers evokes a poignancy beyond the overt displays of language:

Shifting in sleep you sigh, slide
your arm away, uncouple us but
take my hand and draw me round:
refolding, so, our doubled bloodbeat, breath.

And all the years we’ve known each other,
lose and nightly find each other
return to this – return to this
refolding of ourselves in darkness ...

For all his poems of cleverness, Kirkpatrick’s collection pivots on such a moment of bodily and emotional connection, drawn quietly into the bloodbeat of evocative language.