Reviewers are right to focus on the collection’s Australiana theme, which is central and gives it its coherence and discursive force – not to mention its title. But to do so exclusively overlooks its fullness as literature. The writing alternates between lyric poems, diary poems, prose poems, and short essays, as well as pieces that veer between these forms. Some adopt an epistolary mode to address someone dear but unnamed (the intimate other ‘J’ appears infrequently as a subject or addressee). Readers may be surprised to find lyric mellifluence infusing poems that critically address colonial history, as in ‘The Last Endeavour’: ‘And it was from each to each that ghosts grew boats: tree / spectre stacked sliced for belief and buoyancy to break / waves against the encroachable unknown.’ Take, as well, these devastating lines from ‘THE INLAND SEA’:

                They’re dragging black bodies
through the halls, shooting black bodies on
the street, blood on the concrete the wattle
the sheets.

There are formally unconventional poems, such as ‘PYRO’ and ‘With Hidden Noise’, made up wholly or mostly of upper-case lettering; their typography seems to spur the poet to break from her introspective and measured tone: to be blunter and faster in getting to her point. There are also thematic surprises. I was startled, for instance, by the naked eroticism of the poem ‘Bread’.

Dropbear has a compelling flow that is maintained by shifts in forms and by a consistently intimate storytelling voice. Occasionally, I was unconvinced by a poem’s placement, especially those quieter in mood and softer in tone. ‘Hold’, ‘Boab’, and ‘See You Tonight’, while engaging in themselves, are placed between others that are incendiary, or formally disparate, and seem to fade as a consequence.

‘Playing in the Pastoral’, a hybrid poem-essay, includes crossed-out words to object to their exploitative use in the pastoral genre, or else to show – in the deconstructive mode – that they are insufficient yet indispensable. It also underscores suppressed terms that the poet considers necessary: ‘since invasion, haunted / structured hallowed settler responses to, and representations / restraints of Aboriginal land home and its custodians’. In ‘To the Poets’, Araluen states: ‘You cannot / redeem the pastoral … You cannot put back into the earth / what you’ve taken from it. You’ve disturbed the ancestors. The words are wounds and that’s done now.’ I suspect that this attitude to literary representation, especially as found in Australiana, will be foreign to many, even those in politically progressive circles. But this is Dropbear’s provocation. It is a remarkable collection: rich in artistry, knowledge, and insight.

Eunice Andrada’s second poetry collection, TAKE CARE, is also invested in the political: specifically in how colonialism and imperialism inform (diasporic) Filipinos’ experiences of trauma. The collection’s themes – sexual assault, rape, labour, social oppression under patriarchy, activism, and self-preservation – all relate to this overarching context. This historical–political preoccupation is continuous with Andrada’s début, Flood Damages (2018). TAKE CARE weaves its thematic threads tighter, however, with few loose ends.

Andrada is of Ilonggo ancestry, from the Philippines, but her work’s raw lyricism may be placed in the confessional genre, which has included such poets as Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath. The genre explores taboo subjects for poetry, allowing female poets to speak candidly of desire, or of sexual trauma. Andrada situates such traumas in imperial histories, and looks unwaveringly at their perpetrators. For instance, in an untitled poem, she addresses atrocities committed by American soldiers in the Philippines: ‘Under the Visiting Forces Agreement, / the condition of legal immunity / to commit rape is agreed upon.’ The preceding twenty-two-line poem mentions the word ‘rape’ or derivations of it sixteen times:

A rapist decides what I do with my body
after rape. A rapist on trial doesn’t believe
he’s a rapist. A rapist doesn’t like being called
a rapist. A rapist raping doesn’t believe in rape,
its perversion of simpler ideas …

A standout lyric, which alludes to rape and abduction, is ‘I Write the Poem’. Filmic in imagery, the poem describes a car trip with a man; it closes with the speaking ‘I’ sprinting from the car, and the lines: ‘I write the poem to bury / the endings.’ This is not to overstate the presence of such subjects in TAKE CARE, which takes its title from acts of care. Such acts are infused with tenderness for friends, family, and activist communities. The poet also situates these acts in forms of employment that Filipinas are expected to take up: nursing and cleaning, for instance. In the eponymous poem, set in Jerusalem, the phrase is both an injunction between Filipinos, as they disperse into the night after a party, and a reminder of labours of ‘care’ that seem to define them. The concrete poem ‘Pipeline Polyptych’, laid out in the shape of four cylindrical pipes, describes cheap Filipino labour ‘piped’ to Israel and the USA: ‘supply / chains ensure / America will never / be forsaken’.

Andrada’s calligrams – concrete poems whose form relates to theme – are often her most compelling. This was also the case in Flood Damages: one of its most affecting poems, ‘Prescription’, is composed of one line, ‘believe him when he hurts you’, repeated twenty-five times in a vertical block. TAKE CARE’s two most striking poems respond to patch-worked news articles about the removal of ‘statues dedicated to “comfort women”’ in the Philippines. In the first, a block of news text has lines erased from its middle, in the shape of an erect penis. In the second, Andrada’s words form the shape of this penis; it features the lines: ‘the reminder / of a woman raped: in- / tolerable, too real too real …’ (below this, ‘too real’ is repeated fifty-five times, making up the shaft and root of the penis).

Given the symbolic force of such poems, I hope the poet will work with calligrams more often. TAKE CARE features a handful; the majority of the collection is in free-verse lyric. My sense is that a higher proportion of calligrams would increase the dynamism of such a collection, with its insistent probing of entwined subjects. That said, TAKE CARE is undeniably a coherent and artful collection – one that is unafraid to shine light in the darkest of places.