A good example is the book’s first poem, ‘On the Beach’, where a couple on a crepuscular (Melbourne?) beach observe another almost otherworldly pair, a ‘lonely duo’ who eventually ‘drift along / and vanish past the headland to the south: / and we are left to ask each other’s eyes / if we should follow in their wake or stay / for the duration of the night, the week, the world’. It’s a fine example of Wallace Stevens’s dictum: ‘Poetry should resist the intelligence, almost successfully.’ The watchers in the poem don’t know whom they have seen, but they (and we readers) can’t help but sense their transcendent significance.

A comparable poem, though lighter in spirit, is ‘Disputation’. It has a characteristically paradoxical beginning: ‘In those years we could still remember the future.’ The action apparently takes place in some deeply Catholic academy or abbey. Again, the poem ends mysteriously but not frustratingly: ‘The milling scholars, black-robed and pale as rubricators, / shadowed each other among the Ionic colonnades, / disregarding the airships that circled the slowing sky / or stood off among the ingenuous clouds, / proclaiming their terrible heresy.’

The book’s second section serves mainly to evoke the poet’s Sydney adolescence – and, at one point, the journey that took him there from his birthplace in Poland. Generally, the mood is airy and self-ironising, but there are exceptions, most notably in ‘To my Half-Brother’, with its dedication to ‘Aleksander Skowron (1942–44)’ after whom the poet is named. ‘What were you feeling, / thinking, on that last walk you took together, to the left? / Did you cling tightly to your mother’s hand? / Were you beside each other at the end, when the gas came?’ Theodor Adorno notoriously claimed that: ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ This is just one of a few poems about the Holocaust that clearly prove Adorno wrong.

Different again is Skovron’s sequence ‘The Light We Convert’. The twelve poems each comprise twelve lines, one for every step of the chromatic scale. It’s witty and ludic – though possibly something of an cognoscente’s pleasure. Poem VII, for example, refers to Richard Wagner’s marriage to the much younger Cosima von Bülow before going on to paint the composer himself as someone who ‘struts / about the city, puffed with ambition, sorcerer, / a brilliant bigot lunging for the flame / of immortality. Even N shuts his door to him / now. Yet music will never be the same.’ Not all of Skovron’s readers will, of course, have the satisfaction of recognising ‘N’ as Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher, but that doesn’t mean the allusion is not a risk worth taking.

Towards the middle of Letters, there is a section that displays Skovron’s idiosyncratic and often overlooked humour. On occasion, as in ‘The Other Side’, it consists in the playful use of an almost excessive erudition. Elsewhere, as in ‘Barcarolle’, it can involve the weary description of a café (European preferably) where everything is jokily predictable (‘the grizzled waiter / practises the air of a dilettante at rest’). On another occasion, it can be a wedding where things go seriously awry (‘Among the rhododendrons, behind the drive, a churl wrestles / with a virgin’s brief’). The word ‘churl’ is a typically Skovronian touch.

The relative ‘lightness’ of such poems is conceivably a preparation for the next section, which contains several of the book’s most memorable and disturbing poems. A few of these, e.g. ‘Passarola’, a dramatic (almost melodramatic) monologue spoken by Bartolomeu de Gusmão, inventor of the first hot-air machine (well before the Montgolfier brothers), rely on an almost self-conscious ingenuity and a mock-heroic manner: ‘Had I not conquered the miracle / of flight, three generations before those two / upstart French balloonists?’

Immediately following ‘Passarola’ are two of the collection’s most powerful poems, ‘Antietam’ and ‘Sixteen Men’. The first demonstrates the continuing power of the Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner photos of the American Civil War. Skovron’s tone here is distinctive: ‘the eruption / of light would immortal their monochrome fate / onto an innocent membrane of glass, / their ghosts imprisoned to stare from the panels / that now alone etched their singular trace’.

The second poem, ‘Sixteen Men’, is an unforgettable account, in plain diction, of just one example of the extraordinary cruelty of the Nazi imperium. Tellingly, Skovron doesn’t specify exactly who the victims are – probably Jewish civilians but possibly resistance members. Either way, the poem has a shocking, almost mathematical clarity. ‘The sixteen men / stand with their faces to the pit they have hollowed / with their own hands, then – drop / to their knees as if in prayer and topple // forward into the grave they have prepared / with their own hands. Their forms rustle / as they slide into the freshened earth’.

While ‘Sixteen Men’ may be Letters from the Periphery’s most resonant poem, the title sequence of seventeen poems is its signature achievement. Strange epistles arrive from an almost apologetic, but loving, stalker. An unendurable tension is built up as the reader progressively struggles to identify the letters’ author. It is not for this reviewer, however, to reveal the sequence’s chilling ending.

Letters from the Periphery is arguably Skovron’s most accomplished, and unsettling, collection to date.