Although these poems do not all come from the beginning of Lehmann’s career, we can see the process of discontinuity in favour of fully examining possibilities. None of these narratives connects to the others, but they share the same ominous tone and atmosphere of the uncanny, as though the possibilities latent in border-ballad narration were being explored.

In the section of ‘earlier poems’ placed after these sonnets we can see a double perspective. There are personal poems, especially about Lehmann’s father, but also about the fate of his grandfathers, one a rural doctor, the other a carpenter building a church in New Guinea. In a way these might be seen as parts of a process of investigating all the twists and turns of genetic history.

But there are also poems – ‘An Aristocrat at the Time of the Emperor Julian’, ‘Kiev Waiting for the Mongol Hordes’, for example – which allow the poetic imagination to inhabit lurid historical landscapes and exploit them for their allegorical possibilities as expressions of personal experience. ‘After the Examinations Chinese-Style’, for all the accuracy with which it captures the slightly mad character of the medieval Chinese examinations for entering the bureaucracy, is also about an Australian student and poet passing his law exams.

Geoffrey Lehmann (photograph by John Lehmann, 2007)

There is, in these movements into excitingly lurid places and times, just a touch of early Slessor, whose imagination had a similar drive. It makes one think about Lehmann’s antecedents and his literary-historical position. Perhaps we are dealing here with the last of the vitalists. A poem which is important in this respect is ‘For J.A.R. McKellar’ since that poet, considered at the time to be one of great promise (and who died suddenly in 1932 in his late twenties) was also a Sydney poet anxious to move into European history in his poems. ‘All through your verse there blows / A gracious, clean, colonial innocence’ says Lehmann’s poem. It is tempting to read it as both a celebration of a poetic avatar and a little warning: don’t think that my historical poems will be schoolboyishly naïve.

In a sense, ‘For J.A.R. McKellar’ is one gateway to these exotic poems which extend as far as the book-length sequence, Nero’s Poems (1981). The other is ‘An Image’, an extraordinary poem made all the more extraordinary by being written in 1957, when Lehmann was seventeen. It begins ‘Lions on a beach at dusk. A strange quality / Is in this image, a quality of sameness’, and goes on to build a kind of narrative about the scene.

The image must be the origins of Lehmann’s first major sequence ‘Meditations for Marcus Furius Camillus, Governor of Africa’. At one level, it is a meditation on empire and the natural world. Its narrator is a civilised and sympathetic governor interested in lions, foreign slaves, and dolphins as exemplars of different kinds of life. But he is tasked with providing animals for Rome’s circuses and thus supervises the dirty work of empire. His intimations of a world of living and communicating beyond the conventions of his day mark him out as a poet manqué.

Nero, whose large suite of poems remains my favourite work of Lehmann’s, was, in contrast, a practising poet. ‘Qualis artifex pereo’ – ‘What an artist dies (in me)’ – were, reputedly, his dying words. In his introduction to the individual volume, Nero’s Poems, Lehmann noted that our fascination with Nero derives from his being the only absolute ruler in history ‘who regarded himself primarily as an artist’. He just had a bad press because he was memorialised by historians who came from the senatorial class he despised.

Again, the interest seems a vitalist one: what kind of empire is produced by a genuinely creative spirit? History says a very bad one, but Lehmann is much more forgiving, and his Nero is more sympathetic than in conventional portrayals. The entire sequence seems a development of Tacitus’s remarkable judgement that Nero treated the whole city as though it were his house. As Lehmann’s ‘Proem’ says:

In hectic verse I’ll sing
of an oyster woman’s son
with curly hair – that’s me –
and embrace my girl-friend – the nation.

Although the poems devoted to Nero form a large group, the following section, a series of monologues spoken by Lehmann’s first father-in-law, Ross McInerney (second husband of photographer Olive Cotton), is twice as long and occupies more than a quarter of the book. Again the multiple perspectives are important but together the poems could be seen as a set of attempts to answer the question of how we should live in the world today. One of their functions is to capture a disappearing rural past (rather in the manner of some of Geoff Page’s early poems); another is to celebrate the clear-eyed rural perspective. But you suspect that there is a dramatic sensibility at play as well; that Lehmann is entranced by the vocal mannerisms of his narrator.

Poems 1957–2013 is rounded out by a hundred pages or so of later poems, many of which appeared in the volume Children’s Games (1990) and which focus on the experience of parenthood, especially single-parenthood. ‘I have lived in the extreme latitudes of child rearing,’ Lehmann says in a poem which begins as a parody of ‘Howl’,

I have held what I hoped would become
the best minds of a generation
Over the gutter outside an Italian coffee
shop watching the small
Warm urine splatter on the asphalt –
impatient to rejoin
An almond torta and a cappuccino at a
formica table.

These autobiographical poems develop later into two self-portraits (written in his sixties), again adopting the technique of revisiting a phenomenon, here the self, to explore it further.

The book’s final poem is something of a gift for reviewers: it is about what poetry has meant to Lehmann – ‘Poetry is our human love of metaphor ... Poetry is non-local causality. / We are bathed in a mysterious glow’ – but I think the real distinctiveness of this poet’s lifetime work lies in his method of approaching subjects from all different perspectives, inhabiting them but then standing outside of them, not to spin the subject out but to see something of the complexity within.