This is partly because Brophy reaches back through time via his family, who seem even more rooted in the Coburg dustiness than he is, and partly because his vocation as a poet seems so old-fashioned. In an early poem, ‘Why I became a poet’, he is the bookish son, the failed priest, the puzzled parent. In other hands this might have been clichéd, but here is a brave attempt to explain the inexplicable. ‘Letters black as priests press themselves against pages stripped from trees. I order and reorder the words to find the patterns that recall a miracle.’

In later poems, the poet is more worldly – metaphorical and metaphysical, to be sure, but less god-bothered. Death, dying, the dead are increasingly present, but unreligiously, in the same way that poetry is, in unexpected scenarios. So the dead wake, in their suburban way, as ‘they come down the middle of the road / to the railway station at the end / and there they flick their hands at shadows. / Flies drift through them.’

Flies drift through them. The book is filled with arresting moments like that. Clever conceits usually deepen, rather like Larkin’s continental shelf, but without the misery. Brophy knows why he is a poet now, but still asks, ruminatively, what a poem is for, and what it is like. An unoccupied house perhaps, he suggests in ‘Difficult’: ‘The lived in emptiness of every room / makes it hard to choose a reader for this poem. / No meal has been prepared and no money has been left / in an envelope with your name on it.’

Kevin Brophy
(photograph by Nicholas Walton-Healey)

Shades of Gil Scott-Heron there, and much of Brophy’s poetry has a declamatory rhythm to it that a beat, were he that kind of poet, would naturally cleave to. There is an increasing force as the years go by, so that in a recent ‘love poem’, two all-too-recognisable but wondrous teenagers lie on a beach, the girl with the future in her eyes ‘like fresh gum in her mouth, like a shirt begging to be taken off. While the boy, the boy is an old story with its own new beginning. He drove her here past the dead dog dumped at the end of the road.’

‘Brophy always finds the blue note that prevents any stiffness creeping in.’

‘Dead Dog Dumped’ is a prose poem, from the new collection, Walking, and echoes those in Radar (2012), hiscollaboration with Nathan Curnow. Brophy’s prose poems are surreal, but only up to a point, and without the distancing, faux-elegant strangeness prose poetry often affects. Brophy always finds the blue note that prevents any stiffness creeping in. For example, in ‘Australian Street, Summer’, nature is reclaiming the suburbs, as a resident watches, but then, in the relentless blue of the afternoon, ‘He wished he had a job to go to. No one should have to witness this kind of transformation in their own street. What had the council been thinking?’

Radar acts as a kind of hinge in this collection, as if Brophy’s imagination has since then been redirected, distilled. His parents are, in Walking, present as they have always been, but more conditionally: ‘At 86 and 91 they are still together / more or less / and greet me at the door / as if I am the punch line to a joke / they were just recalling.’ Love and desire are much more intense and direct, and Brophy is abroad more, not quite knowing what to make of it all. In ‘London’, he writes of ‘puzzled archaeologists / who might as well be poets / for all they know about the past’.

But through this increasingly contingent world the glorious mess of Sydney Road still runs, connecting everything. In 1992, ‘when my nephew visits from Doncaster / he asks me why there is so much broken glass on my footpaths. / “This is Brunswick,” I tell him, / where life is as fine as rail yard dust.’ In 2013, ‘We walk to wooden steps above the rail track, / stand with broken glass, abandoned bottles’, while ‘just behind Brunswick, as it always does, the old sun rolls /into that dark slot in the far horizon’. The hipsters may come and go, but the broken glass and the sun are forever.