People often say of a child that they are ‘an old soul’. At the risk of patronising Vanessa Page, author of this adamantine, lyrical first collection, she has ‘an old eye’, which she trains on her experience and surroundings. In five lines in ‘Sanctuary’ she does everything that Sappho does: elsewhere, many lines echo Brecht’s mimetic gestures. None of this feels deliberate, and it is wonderfully encouraging to find a young Australian poet who can traverse and claim terrains so apparently foreign and unforgiving.

Brett Dionysius, launching this book, said that Page had ‘foregone 20 years of writing juvenilia to spring from the forehead of the Queensland poetry scene as a fully-fledged post-Athena poet’. He was almost right, except that in the final section, with new love and a guarded happiness in play, Page lets her Cyprian rigour slip. It may simply be that sadness is a more contemplative state than happiness – in the same way that pessimists are said to be those who see the world most clearly – but the book ends on an artless, breathy note, and now the verse has a more obviously youthful feel to it. The poet’s attention, her language, undergo a carefree diffusion, but, after so much control and clarity, acquired at such cost for our benefit, we should take pleasure in it, as she does.