Tranter questions his role at the outset. In his Introduction he writes, ‘I’m not sure that we can trust the word “best” when we’re talking about poetry.’ He admits that, like all readers, his appreciation of individual poems can be limited by his particular sensibility. Tranter appears reluctant to say much about his vision of the anthology (instead quoting substantial portions of text from poet John Ashbery, film-maker Luis Buñuel, and critic Tzvetan Todorov), but he creates a patchwork of images that appear in poems he has selected. These images, knitted into a kind of prose cento, form the strongest statement about his approach to editing the anthology. However, in these pages, Tranter has used his purported readerly limitations to advantage: the poems in this year’s volume have a particularly cosmopolitan zing. Are they all worthy of inclusion in a book that bears the stamp ‘best’? Perhaps not. Is this a substantial volume in its own right? Absolutely.

What is striking in a book filled with the cosmopolitan and worldly – inclusions bear titles such as ‘Late Night Shopping’, ‘Georges Perec in Brisbane’, and ‘Miracle on Blue Mouse Street, Dublin’ – is that some of the strongest poems in this year’s selection engage the natural world. Diane Fahey’s ‘Terns’, a sonnet that turns on the contrast between birds in flying ‘epic arcs’ and their standing selves, ‘dumpy and winsome’, is a concentrated, tight, and polished poem that, despite the editor’s protest that there is no such thing as a ‘best’ poem, seems to earn that title. Another poem of the natural world is Robert Gray’s longer, looser ‘Flying Foxes’. Gray’s bats inhabit the natural landscape Moreton Bay figs, but are themselves transformed, mechanised:

They are Leonardo
contraptions. They extend
a prosthetic limb,
snarl, and knuckle-walk
like simians …

The poem draws attention to the weirdness of the creatures examined through such uncanny similes. Sarah Holland-Batt’s poem ‘The Capuchin’ similarly contemplates the animal world. Holland-Batt questions her own relation to the monkey she considers, noting that she has ‘seen his brethren / swinging high in the balsa trees’ in their natural habitats, and has been struck by their ‘fingers fine as Julieta cigars’. She is now brought face-to-face with the capuchin in captivity. In her approach ‘like a penitent’ to this creature, the poet questions the animal–human relationship. While these poems stand out all the more because they are thrown into relief by the urbane bustle of the majority, their presence also seems to indicate that they are poems that couldn’t be denied a place in this anthology.

The urbane bustle is more of a mixed bag, but many of these poems are well worth reading and rereading. One particular feature that Tranter offers in his anthology is humour and, at times, a laudable exuberance. Michael Farrell’s poem ‘Motherlogue’ is a dense and very funny poem in which the Devil appears on horseback in Wahroonga. He chants the ‘Ave Maria’ backwards in many languages, engaging in a linguistic duel with the poem’s speaker. Similarly, Astrid Lorange’s ‘Lovetypes’ brims with energy: ‘I speak of love in one pan; love for potatoes / love in a tablet, love and debts or sermons.’ Lorange’s catalogue is playful, uncompromising in the joy it takes in language and the world.

Elsewhere, exhibition takes centre stage. Lisa Gorton’s ‘Dreams and Artefacts’, written after the Titanic Artefact Exhibition and shortlisted for the 2011 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, demonstrates her quiet care. The opening phrases, ‘Patiently, ticket by ticket’, speak to Gorton’s meticulously crafted poems. Her closing vision of clouds gathering overhead as ‘slo-mo historical epics with the sound down, / playing to no one’ is cinematic, and turns the real world into another exhibition. Jennifer Harrison’s poem ‘Busker and Chihuahua, Chapel Street’ also considers exhibition in a ‘real world’ scenario. Other highlights in this year’s selection include Peter Minter’s ‘Claustrophilic Lavallière’, Gig Ryan’s ‘Daphnis and Chloe’, Jaya Savige’s ‘January’, Peter Steele’s ‘The Knowledge’, and Maria Takolander’s ‘Ashes’.

While these poems are standouts, many others bear a distinctly ephemeral quality. This raises an interesting question: in an anthology that is an annual publishing event, and will be replaced next year with a new set of ‘best’ poems, what place should ephemerality take? No doubt the ephemeral is part of the literary landscape every year, and Tranter does well to remind us of this. However, some poems address the velocity of modern life with more success than others. Among them, Jane Gibian’s ‘Leftovers from a Pirate Party’ takes the form of a series of advertisements, akin to those posted on websites such as Craigslist, putting the debris of modern life under the spotlight. While the poem is ostensibly just a list of objects, those objects – such as ‘Old goth / punk clothes, / size 12-14’, ‘Inflatable Santa – giveaway or loan’, and even ‘3 vacuum cleaners, / no wands’ – prompt the reader to wonder about the current and future possessors of such idiosyncratic items. Whether these advertisements were found or imagined, Gibian’s decision to let this catalogue speak for itself allows the objects to hint at stories. This approach to ephemerality is more striking than many of the poems that take up Frank O’Hara’s ‘I do this I do that’ mode.

While the breadth of this particular annual offering allows The Best Australian Poems 2011 to include a wider array of poets – and provides space for poets in the early stages of their career – the example of the American series of Bests is worth keeping in view. Those editors have the unenviable task of limiting the ‘hits’ for the year to just seventy-five drawn from a much larger community of poets and possible ‘best poems’. Meanwhile, with more than a hundred poems drawn from a much smaller pond, Tranter’s offering of Australia’s best makes the reader dig a little deeper to find the real treasures. Undoubtedly, though, the treasures are there to be found.