Kelen’s poems lack the more overtly activist note evident in the work of poets such as John Kinsella and Jennifer Maiden. Didacticism is moderated by humour and/or melancholy. And as ‘the good old days’ suggests, while abhorring the monochrome, Kelen can adopt an ironic stance to rose-tinged pasts. Modernity and its trappings, nonetheless, don’t emerge looking pretty.

Kelen also eschews the long, exploratory phrasings typical of, say, John Kinsella’s poetry. His concerns are conveyed with unfussy sentences, judicious vernacular, and occasional rhyme. Early poems such as ‘From a Bus Leaving Lithgow at Night’ (‘The trees are ghosts with human spirit’) and ‘Jungle’ (‘Jungle has broken into the city’) offer simple yet playful animist images. In successive poems over the years, Kelen celebrates remnants of the natural world that survive and defy urban and suburban encroachment.

Island Earth is broken into nine sections that loosely represent the previous seven books and several chapbooks that the prolific Kelen has produced. The last section, ‘Seasons’, offers a selection of the poet’s most recent work. Kelen has travelled widely, especially in South-East Asia, and in 1998 undertook a writing residency in Vietnam. His experiences in Asia have informed many of his collections – notably Trans-Sumatran Highway and Other Poems (1995) and Dragon Rising (1998). ‘Java Idyll’, for example, which offers sharp, energetic snapshots of Indonesia’s main island, captures the chaotic traffic, ‘sculpted mountains’, Buddha statues, casual cruelty to animals, and imports ranging from Jimi Hendrix and Demi Moore to planeloads of tourists who ‘smuggle pinkness onto Moslem beaches’. Kelen’s is a sensitive and sympathetic portrait of Vietnam in particular, still in some measure recovering from a time when ‘Everyone lost somebody / when the heartless and stupid ruled America / sent over soldiers and bombers’. A poem such as ‘Tourists in Lucknow’ – its impoverished rickshaw cyclist a ‘sinew machine’ who pulls a knife on his initially trusting occupants – provides a check against touristic sentimentalism.

The section ‘Motor West’ is devoted entirely to the US West and Midwest and its iconic highway journeys. ‘Route 66’ is a nostalgic road trip along the ‘Unpoliceable haven’ that was the eponymous trans-American artery before ‘The Government took Route 66 off / The map’ – one of the rare occasions we see the poet lament the loss of tarmac for trees. (Enslavement to the motor vehicle is one idea of American freedom with which Kelen wryly sympathises.) ‘Mid-West 1’ sees how the ‘free spirit changes gear / Fuel-injected, turbo-charged’, while in ‘Happy Meal’, ‘The highway is an eating trail’ through land where ‘a cowboy can read the meaning of the beans’.

Kelen’s gaze returns, usually, to Australia: to its struggling small towns and sparse rural stretches, its highways and bus depots, its dispossessed Indigenous people, and the spiritless shopping mall that is the late twentieth century’s take on the dark satanic mill – a Westfield of the heart. ‘Megalong Valley’ tenderly and with a conservationist ethos sketches ‘the last pure tract of Megalong’. ‘Ghost Town on the Murray’ and ‘Whyalla Cantos’ are honest, if less tender, portraits of hardbitten towns dying or doing it tough. ‘Federal Highway’ commutes the American Greyhound bus trip to Australia.

The collection’s title appears to come from a mid-career poem, ‘Fission’: ‘TV spawns a billion little Hitlers: Radiation Plus, this Island Earth.’ A lament in part for the destruction of Hiroshima, the spirit of this poem pervades much of the collection – a fusion that sees the natural world crashing against global economics, and ordinary people whose lives and very existence are subject to push-button forces beyond their reckoning.

Not all the poems in Island Earth are earthly delights. Kelen’s use of the colloquial sometimes lapses into cliché, and he can be unsubtle – such as with the metaphor in ‘Imperial Vampire’. Other poems can be difficult to penetrate: ‘Flowers’ maps a kind of road trip of the mind, one that might best be taken with the right intoxicant to hand. But many poems deserve and will reward multiple readings. These include ‘Bon Voyage’, Kelen’s superb elegy for a dead father. ‘One Afternoon over Baghdad’, by contrast, is a chilling description of the ability to kill with the ease of playing a video game – have ‘joystick’ and ‘dude’ ever had such sinister inflections? Among new poems, ‘The Bond Poem’ is a wry take on an aged 007, ‘Boy’ a tender portrait of an infant, and ‘Seasons’ a deft tracking of seasons by way of sport, where ‘moments transcend human argument’ and ‘there is no need for war’ – an aspiration Kelen and many of his readers might like politicians to embrace.