After the amusing conflation of Banjo Paterson and the poisonous weed Paterson’s Curse, the echo of Bruce Beaver’s Letters to Live Poets (I), is wryly funny. It is apt, too, that this particular letter, addressed to the recently deceased Frank O’Hara, is the one evoked here: some decades later, an Australian poet will once again address a more established American. It also feeds on from the mock lament for Adam Lindsay Gordon, dead on a beach in the previous poem, to the death of O’Hara. The narrative that follows is earnest, deadpan, and bizarre.

Leaves of Glass gives an intriguing, sometimes enigmatic picture of an uneven relationship. Though some of what is now contemporary in it will soon seem as historic as Whitman and O’Dowd themselves, it is a book that plays some deft games with time and voice, and will repay rereading.