Ground by Martin Langford (Puncher and Wattman)

These are poems firmly situated in place – the Sydney region in particular. The Australian bush with its heat, colours, and creatures is the literal and figurative ground, 'the local... / where / we touch the earth'. The poet evokes the bush as the ground from which to move into the 'chronicles' of time, and of colonial Australian history in particular. Langford uses the expressive medium of poetry to do what Kate Grenville did in prose in The Secret River (2005): to try and inhabit the experience and significance of early Europeans in Australia and to grapple with the ongoing issue of settler-guilt. The visceral spectacle of 'Pemulwuy's blood' still stains the beauty of this place, and in 'The Massacres' Langford acknowledges the limits of his art to heal the damage done to indigenous Australians: 'this is no artistic story – where griefs are transformed / by the skill of the pen into grace.'

The collection also proposes a way forward, emblematised in the metaphor of the dance as a space of negotiation 'Where neither is privileged'. Wielding the beauty and power of poetic language, Langford exhorts us to lose and find ourselves in the exchange of the dance:

unless
we, too,
get the weight of this place
in our bodyminds – work-dance
and mouth-dance its textures and
    beats –
it will vanish from under our gaze
like the bush-rat's plump tail.

Eating My Grandmother: A Grief Cycle by Krissy Kneen (University of Queensland Press)

Eating My Grandmother: A Grief Cycle (University of Queensland Press, $24.95 pb, 104 pp, 9780702253744) represents Krissy Kneen's first foray into poetry; she is better known for her erotic fiction and memoir. In this passionate collection, she takes up the more open and reflective mode of the poetic in order to register the profound grief she experiences at her loved grandmother's death. As the many forms of the elegy tell us, poetry provides a 'safe place' in which to house the near-inexpressibility of loss; its rhythms, images and here, its open forms, allow for the exploration of intense feeling while creating a ritualistic structure, a 'cycle' in which to meet, re-meet, and perhaps finally resolve the gaping wounds of grief.

Kneen's collection pivots on the central image of eating – sometimes in relation to the literal nurturing offered by the grandmother who was so central in her life, but also as a metaphor for understanding the 'choke' of grief. In a version of the sacrament, the speaker ingests her grandmother's body, neither able nor wanting to be separate from her: 'I pick a grain of her, stolen from the urn / Place it on my tongue. / Her body. / My blood. // She lodges in me.' It is a visceral and disturbing image, especially as the speaker is repeatedly intent on this bodily holding of her grandmother's body. However, it graphically conveys the human resistance to death and is ultimately shown to be an act of love where the grandmother is 'hosted' by the speaker, who in turn prolongs her living.

Like many cycles, Eating My Grandmother comes close to being repetitive, to losing its intensity as an act of productive mourning; but the effects of its imagery and the love Kneen clearly feels for her complicated family sustain this haunting series of poems.

Now You Shall Know by Jennifer Compton (Five Islands Press)

The title poem of Jennifer Compton's most recent collection, Now You Shall Know (Five Islands Press, $25 pb, 86 pp, 9780734050366), won the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2013; it sets an important conceptual and stylistic tone as the introduction to this book. Carefully crafted in long enjambed couplets, the poem excavates the pivotal moment of the hiatus, the 'thrumming stillness' in which we might 'believe we are travelling forward'. In this way, it demonstrates what poetry can achieve in the hands of a skilled practitioner – the evocation of an image (the plane 'hung in the sky from a clever hook', the cough that interrupts the recording of Maria Callas's voice), which can transport a reader into the liminal space suspended between apparent certainties.

As a veteran poet, playwright, and essayist, Compton produces poetry that is strong, intellectual as well as domestic, and utterly no-nonsense. In 'The Little Boy Knocked Off His Bike,' she registers the visceral desire 'to rush and kneel beside him / – to touch him, smell him – ' which is tempered by a need 'to clench my will / to keep on walking down to Aldi'.

Compton's voice ranges confidently across a diversity of themes: a mother's death and its aftermath, the poignant struggles of ordinary people, the business of parenting adult children as well as grandparenting, the loss of religious certainty in the Enlightenment and the personal and philosophical insights available to the gardener. Tenderness, guilt, the desperation to live – Compton suggests that the complicated spectrum of experience can be understood through the intersection of the craft and intent of human hands working with the 'fever' of the things that grow: 'Everything I ever learned / was from gardening.'