The Ladder by Simon West (Puncher and Wattman)

There is a relative lack of electricity in Simon West's The Ladder (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 54 pp, 9781922186768) and, by chance of reading sequence, some grinding down through the gears required to take him in at the required pace. In his case, we have a measured classicism and a loving embrace of Italian art and culture, both observed, it seems, through a kind of glass darkly. The pagan primitive energy of Rome, with its veneer of law and culture, is here distilled to a kind of Anglican poise, all deference and lack of offence, and modern Italy fustified into a set from a Visconti film. There is the occasional glimpse of Roger Corman, but only a faint one.

It is as if the physical world is being put though a kind of ekphrastic mincer. Ekphrastic poems, usually about paintings in European settings, are notably problematic in Australian poetry. They are a problem here, too, and West's tendency to see his life as a kind of tableau, along with his sudden metric lunges, can have a flattening effect. In an ostensibly Australian poem about running in the early morning ('The Sports Oval'), for instance: 'But soon with impetus that's all their own / your thighs are lifting past themselves. / Adrenalin sets free its spirits. Gone / is the whim merely to know the shape of things.'  The seemingly placid and clear description of place and affect act instead as a kind of fog, obscuring the world.

Jam Sticky Vision by Luke Beesley (Giramondo)

In Luke Beesley's case, contrarily, what looks like a wildly surreal accumulation of moments and wordplay (Jam Sticky Vision, Giramondo, $24 pb, 72 pp, 9781922146847) pops out its extrusions of clarity like some poetic 3D printer. Ekphrasis is triumphantly reinstated, because for each iteration, while the idea of it is hard to encompass, the object is undeniably there. Beesley ranges across every kind of modern culture, from cinema (Malick, Lynch, Wenders); to music ( lo-fi genius Bill Callahan); writing – Joyce, O'Hara, Tagore; and art – a lovely riff on Marcel Duchamp called 'Nude descending a Solo': 'Cut page dessert knife salsa at the hour of lunch like pepper pressed tightly in a casual walk, buckled, under the questions. The waitress accommodated against potato, his acumen and silky argument "admired", he claimed, his knife.'

There is even, preposterously, a Gertrude Stein-style reading of Paul Thomas Anderson's film The Master (2012), with cabbages and the sea revolving in endless permutation. It works. When he takes on the local, for instance a corner in North Fitzroy, the result is a startling mix of Captain Beefheart and Bulgakov, but also true to the actual corner. Initially dubious, increasingly seduced, I was finally won over by a slip of a poem that is both acute and unceasingly enjoyable. Called 'Festival Chat with Peter Craven', it aspires to no more and no less than this: 'A cyclone entered his hair. Trim lines, / office blocks, and season hazard tragic even // ings crisp summer beer moving elegantly in / Gerald Murnane's beer in numerous novels of his.'

Immune Systems by Andy Jackson (Transit Lounge)

Luke Beesley ventures playfully to India, saying 'India isn't pure anecdote it crumbles in my telling like a poor / motor.' For Andy Jackson, in Immune Systems (Transit Lounge, $23.95 pb, 56 pp, 9781921924828) his calm, heartfelt account of his time in India, it is not anecdote at all, and incarnates itself in the telling, clearly, unsensationally. The first part of the book is a kind of poetic drama-documentary exploring time Jackson spent in India looking at medical tourism, as well as attending literary events. Although inevitably an outsider, he succeeds in turning down the volume on the usual 'shock of India' without denying any of the confronting reality. It may be that his own poetic sensibility, which is to some extent that of an outsider on several levels, enabled him to write these honestly descriptive but never prosaic poems: it certainly feels that way.

'The physical world is being put though a kind of ekphrastic mincer'

The second half of the book is a suite of ghazals. This ancient form, steeped in desire and longing, both constrained and accepting of alteration, suits him perfectly. Sometimes the form is strictly employed, with couplet endings falling, echoing ('mirrors', 'stones', 'alone', 'street'): sometimes it is freer, because as he has written, after weeks in India 'form began to feel absolutely arbitrary'. These poems condense the sights and sounds of the first section into an elemental, ashy, watery, almost funerary ache – the ghazals present many of the same facts, but stare piercingly at the reader, saying explicitly 'Poetry dives, hides deep in the bones. Your body's lost, splutters / in this tidal scent of rubbish, food urine, diesel fumes on the street ' ('Ghazal: Kolkata').

Jean Kent, of these five poets, is the most local, and her new book, The Hour of Silvered Mullet (Pitt Street Poetry, $28 pb, 89 pp, 9781922080448), captures once again the Hunter region of New South Wales, and in the case of the eponymous mullet, Lake Macquarie. There is much nature in Kent's poetry, either in a semi-suburban or rural setting, and often, in this book, in the past. This past is wryly nostalgic – some of the rural childhood reminiscences conjure up Betjeman: but, instead of a shy subaltern, there are 'In a studio above Mitre Ten / and Retrovision / ghosts of Jodie-Anne and Karen-Lynn, / Morag and Gayleen / shadow their younger sisters as they seek / a space, a year / between dressing Barbie dolls for fun / and dressing themselves for the drive-in / in earnest.'

There are shades of Larkin too, but Kent is never imitative, and absolutely never ordinary: the stories are too particular to the place for that, and the unpredictable flashes of steel uniquely hers, and uniquely a reproach to the presumptuous reader. 'The Broken Engagement', for instance, a four-part account of a social disaster presents to the passing eye as a tragicomedy of sorts, but is really a horror story.