Turner’s early poem, ‘Heading West to Koorawatha’, is a good example. It finishes: ‘It is almost dark, and the last of the light / falls onto the canola fields, and onto the hillsides / full of Paterson’s Curse. // I pull over and watch the sun sink / into a stretch of grass.’ Paterson’s Curse neatly embodies the poet’s ambivalence: it is visually beautiful but poisonous to livestock. Significantly, Turner’s action in pulling over to look at it foreshadows the metaphysical dimension that develops towards the end of the collection.

The key continuity in this shift is Turner’s steady concern with verbal perfection. This at times can slow a poem’s impetus, and it is not for nothing that Turner, in a later poem, ‘Apprentice’, celebrates the would-be craftsman’s hands as being ‘wedlocked in the grip of some dogged / perfection, jigged epiphanies, theorems // in the crux of being stubbornly made’.

In many of Woodsmoke’s later poems Turner is noting and/or recreating moments of what even secular readers will be happy to call ‘grace’. His short poem of that title reveals what interests him most, and the closing lines seem to reach out to embrace the book as a whole: ‘Something about how the river rose, and / about the stillness of the birds on the banks / in the rain / and about the way the air made it possible / to forgive – / and be forgiven.’