Andrews forensically notates a hapless grim amusement with the world – ‘the fall of promise into fatigue’ (‘Invisible Hinges’). Incremental actions and remembrance shape and restrain his characters, who often perform in contrast to the intensities of art, nature, or travel. Andrews records the inevitability of change, and a rapidly receding past – ‘sad by accident like the fall of a song / from edgy to catchy to muzak classic’ (‘By Accident’). Yet he is also parodic, wryly fending off any glimpsed decay, part-Prufrock, part-Larkin. In one of the best poems, ‘Megalomania’, the repetition of the possessive ‘my’ magnifies through crisply contained phrases into a tautly mysterious knell:

That dank airshaft, that snowflake’s grave my prison.
The sky my dinted basin, my hearth gone cold.
But ash my seed bed, my poorly hidden key.
Fire my playground cannons facing out to sea.
Fire my grotto full of accidental gold.

The book’s middle section contains a poetic biography of a woman puzzling over her life thus far, hinting at domestic violence that she escapes. This begins with ‘Sunken Sparkle’, where the ‘luminous car’ of the first line ominously transforms at the poem’s close into ‘luminous scar’. These longer, less strictly syllabic, poems also enact the deracination of travel and emigration, with ‘Paradise’ perhaps resembling asylum seekers’ dilemmas – ‘Somewhere round here the West or the North begins. / Paradise from the Persian for “walled around”’ (‘Paradise’).

Andrews has much teasing wordplay – ‘lycanthropic sycophants’, ‘brimming thimbleful’ (‘Loose-Pin Hinge’). ‘The Best Party’ cleverly transforms ‘like’, used colloquially as a substitute for ‘said’, into its use as simile, opening out from reported speech into surrealist images. Tracking from spoken to written, it emphasises how language is defined by context. This poem also complements the earlier ‘The Same Party’ – ‘You missed the best night it was so fantastic. / It was travel bore meet renovation bore ... / She’d been to the dead heart of car world on foot.’ ‘In A Garden State’ apprehends landscape as if in itself righteously beautiful, until the poem reminds that ideologues and psychopaths also happily coexist: ‘It’s not all that hard to get your head around / how something can be both natural and wrong.’ Nature, then, though colourful backdrop, can only redeem if uninvaded.

A well full of weeds can keep a secret but
what do you make a container from to hold
the universal solvent: cynic acid?
A lighthouse no longer identified by
the length of the dark lapse between its flashes
will do you a coffee.
(‘Mare’s Nest’)

This wavering between the natural world and citified existence, between idealism and a critical pragmatism, continues all through Lime Green Chair. ‘The Same Party’ has Michael Faraday’s The Chemical History of a Candle lying open on a table, as if in rebuke. Even Australian weather is seen as humbly mild in contrast to ‘the monumental seasons of Europe’, and the final poem reiterates this humility as the poet, echoing Catullus, commands his ‘little poem’ to ‘get out ... get lost’. Andrews’s often bleak perceptions are softened by humour into a desultory forbearance that somehow remains ambivalent – ‘insomniacs / strapped into the home theatres of their thought’ (‘Strange Perfecter’). These poems circle into argument with themselves, to slightly adjust Yeats’s definition of poetry. Another poem, ‘As Le Tellier Says’, refers to that contemporary Oulipo writer, and the narrator, escaping a dull seminar, thinks ‘I’d rather be astray in a dictionary.’ Andrews is acutely conscious of poetry as a skilful edifice of language.

Lime Green Chair is a densely constructed concatenation of recurring words and images, with a poem’s title often sealed into other poems, or a last line leading into the following poem. Andrews’s bright imagination is liberated by his syllabic constraints, as these poems disclose and marvel at a fallen yet fascinating world, and ruminate around memory and identity.