A key theme running through this edition of the journal is the natural world. Porter acknowledges early on that ‘creative artists’ need this world ‘to provide material and sources for imagery’, and her fellow contributors seem to agree. Witness Maureen Scott Harris’s poem ‘When Winter Was My Friend’, which contains such richly evocative passages as: ‘I loved the tracery of branches – / sometimes threaded with snow like lace, sometimes swaying like seaweed.’ Also, consider Lysenko’s descriptions of writing haiku by the banks of the Merri Creek in Melbourne’s inner-northern suburbs. Lysenko describes how this particular environment has been beneficial to his art and well-being: ‘I was writing about what was around me, instead of what was inside me, and this was calming.’

There are a few weak contributions. Michael Sharkey’s poem ‘We Often Think of You’ is one example, containing lines such as: ‘You’re the heavy breather in the ceiling after dark / the letter we regret we ever wrote.’ These lines are impassioned but unsubtle. They also lack the perceptiveness, restraint and the powerful sense of imagination that makes the other entries to this edition of Island so pleasurable to read.