I am not going to belabour the issues of compiling poetry ethnologies, but I will say that as long as readers insist on rubrics such as ‘Australian’ through which to focus their desire to read place, identity, and culture, then collections of work that challenge the ethnocentricities of such national labelling will be inevitable. In the case of an Australia over-identified with Western ‘civilising’ and subjectivity, to signify Europe in national discussion will necessarily create and get a response from all others. We have to challenge the edifice in as many ways as possible, especially when the edifice claims to represent ‘all’, but doesn’t. Not that many of these poets aren’t well represented elsewhere – they are – but here there is a community of poetry that is comfortable with articulating itself as such.

Contemporary Asian Australian Poets analyses and presents ways of viewing the deeply personal and concomitant social manifestations of ‘self’ within an idea of place. I say an idea of place because wherever you are physically located is the result not of only your own histories of presence and movement, but also those of many others. And the ‘many’ are not only your ‘own people’, but those who pre-date you, and those who are there when you arrive. How those arriving respond to their new homes depends on both the welcome they receive (and how supported they are in ‘adapting’ to their new home), and the damage that’s been done in leaving their previous homes.

As well as the collective preface, this anthology carries three short introductions by the editors: Adam Aitken, Kim Cheng Boey, and Michelle Cahill. All are concise, assertive, and generous. In creating a space for Asian Australian poetry, the editors refuse solely to walk the liminal line between a Eurocentric Australia and the many Asian countries of origin or heritage to, through, and out of which the contributors write. Rather, they show perceived liminalities to be centres in themselves. It is a testament not only to the skill of the editors, but also to the poets included, that few fall into nostalgia or the very debilitating nostalgic ‘race memory’ one finds in many anthologies that equate nation with ethnicity. Kim Cheng Boey writes of the Perth poet Ee Tiang Hong, ‘His poems resist the sentimental backward look; they are an attempt to yoke disparate locations and cultures together in a new mapping of self and place.’ Yes, precisely – in many ways, a poet’s calling. It is excellent to see a selection of Ee Tiang Hong’s poetry here; we don’t hear enough of him, with his ‘strange’ and varied voice.

Of course, there is often a sense of loss, especially in the work of those driven from their originating spaces by war, oppression, and cultural conflict. But any centre’s desire for gratitude at ‘taking on’ the oppressed can be as damaging and debilitating as the cause of those oppressed ‘leaving’ in the first place. This book is intense with leavings and arrivals, but also with modes of retaining contact and connection. That is the nature of heritage, family, and language. Although it is an English-language anthology, there are more than residues in many of its poets’ linguistic memories.

In choosing to be part of this anthology, some poets will necessarily be making a statement of collective refusal to be ‘othered’ in Australia; but there is also a collective statement of sharing and communalism. After all, one country of heritage isn’t another, any more than one religion is another, or one province another, and so on. Geography and cultural narratives make for complex arrangements of borders – forever shifting and fluctuating – but whether the precedents and antecedents are Iranian or Filipino, Chinese or Indian, patterns of interaction and familiarity built over long periods of time attest to a collectivity as much as any notions of a West (which I would argue is a military construct as much as any binary East).

Adam Aitken, a brilliant poet and one of the sharpest thinkers on poetry and post-colonialism around, observes, ‘Embedded in transnational connections, the Asian-Australian is no more certain of self definition than any other kind of Australian.’ The anthologist, and indeed the poet and the reader, constantly risk creating bathos out of sincerity, out of a personal need to articulate the difference they think a reader might expect in their work as ‘other’. All poets are ‘other’. Aitken notes, ‘In Nguyen Tiên Hoàng’s poems about Vietnam, which he left after the end of the war, Vietnam is not the topos found in popular Australian cookery books and travel shows.’ He continues by pointing out ‘that the concept of ‘the Vietnamese’ is a contestable category’ – as is every category of nation and national identity. Belonging is subjective as much as by the demands of family and community.

In a work of such sensitivity to issues of categorising and (mis)representing, it will come as no surprise that the elucidatingof power games around positioning the ‘migrant’ in the new home-space will be extended to women’s position as both migrant and often marginalised voices. Cahill’s introduction affirms and notes the power of language to bind as much as liberate women within male paradigms, and works out of a crisis of the ‘materiality of women’s labour and the limitations of patriarchal spaces [which] marginalise women within the body as text’ to a generative poetics of great agency.

Singling out poets and poems from this superb volume might seem in some ways counter to the intent behind the work, though the editors list and discuss attributes, similarities, and differences. Some of my favourite poets have work here, including the lingua-cultural dialogics of Merlinda Bobis and an investigative Ouyang Yu, the latter with samples of work less acerbic than he often writes (though maybe this is good, because it’s too easy to say Ouyang Yu is acerbic – the ‘accusation’ can be a reductive ploy).

But this is not an acerbic book – it’s not an attack on the centre as much as an intelligent and firm but polite contesting and affirmation. There are fine, probing poems of controlled irony, and testings of identity and belonging, such as in Jaya Savige’s stunning ‘Currency Lad’, Shen’s almost bitter re- and de-culturalisation ‘Noodles’, and Misbah Khokhar’s matter-of-fact declaration of intactness, anti-violence, and sexual agency in ‘Veils of Flags’. At times I wished there was more ‘anger’ across the book. I was taken by Subash Jaireth’s poem ‘Meena, the Elephant, in the Kabul Zoo’ because of its quiet fury and deconstructive deployment of the cover of Les Murray’s Collected Poems which finishes:

As if
to complete the picture
a girl as young as the one
on the cover of Les Murray’s book
walked in the evening.

She fetched
water from the river
flowers from the field
and after taking off
her Jaipuri-legs
sat on the ground
kneeling against the elephant’s back.

That is when
I imagine
the man with the camera
decided to shoot.

On the other hand, identifying ‘food’ as a thing of security and commonality, of heritage and comfort, seems problematical. Indeed, there are many ‘food’ poems in this book, but all humans identify with eating, and very often with the modes of food preparation and the familial bonds and patterns around this. To make claims for something extraordinary runs the risk of appeasing Australia’s fetishisation of food as identity. But it’s a fraught issue, and one that I concede has as many fors as againsts.

This anthology apparently started life as a thematic collation before ending up in alphabetical order. This works well, because it emphasises connections and disparities without imposing a reading of place that is necessarily artificial and constraining. I particularly enjoyed the fortunate juxtaposition of the prose poems of Misbah Khokhar and Bella Li.

Almost everything about this anthology is right. I hope it encourages discussion and discourse around the poems and fascinating introductions.