The fox runs out of this poem into one of Maiden's trademark 'somebody woke up somewhere' poems, in this case Keith Murdoch in New York with his son, Rupert. Conjured into conscience, unfamiliar but quite believable, and dreaming of yet another fox, seen on television outside 10 Downing Street, 'Rupert ran / inside the fox's body, felt its scars / until it found sanctuary in flowers / as red as flags and its very features / were fluid with alert survival.'

Maiden matches the dialectical in these duets (Hillary Clinton–Eleanor Roosevelt, Barack Obama–Mohatma Ghandi, and many others) with compassion and imaginative generosity, making the usual suspects more human, responsible, even admirable. Queen Victoria and Tony Abbott ignore the poet, though, lumpenly refusing to make a poem work (which may even be the point).

Maiden loves exposition and Wunderkammering: 'a pure pedagogical joy in looking things up is optional but also fun,' she has said. Sometimes this makes it hard to see the word for the trees – in regular character George Jeffreys's adventure on Kos, for instance. But at least once in every poem, someone will say something miraculous, and all the knotty fact and allusion are illuminated: or invisible; either one does the trick.

In Breaking the Days by Jill Jones (Whitmore Press, $22.95 pb, 57 pp, 9780987386663), the light is so even that it is difficult to tell how much of it there is. The poet, or the poems at least, move through a world that seems to consist of blocks of experience, memory, and sensation. Sometimes they drift into meaningful configurations, but even these aren't reliable and the poet tests them to destruction with the simplest of contradictions. It is half Parmenidean paradox and half laconic undercut: 'Every corner kills you with its variation. / You slip on another idea. Even the streets are philosophical. / You can tell by their names / which are ordinary and about journeys.'

Various modernist ghosts linger wanly at the edges of the page: Robbe-Grillet, say, or Beckett: 'You write under erasures / one word, another word. / You slip and fail.  // Better than waiting / for what doesn't come.' She undercuts and erases them, though: 'The importance is boring / if that's what it takes. / You say as little, someone else / says less.' In any case, these are not modern times. What kind of times they are is exactly the kind of question Jones will invariably deflate into bathos: 'Each question recognizes itself eventually / there are no such things / as verities / but sometimes you think / you know at least / how to sort papers / knick-knacks and / casual freedoms.'

In Breaking the Days, the world is completely free of the usual particularities that poetry fastens onto. Political events in particular places; identifiable individuals, local colour, acutely described landscape or wildlife, ekphrasis, cultural reference, other poets. In fact, she says, 'Allusions are sometime funny / or sometimes just a mistake / no matter how hard you tap / on the paper and brush / dust off the sentences.' It may be that this is what makes her world seem so unsettling: so much of our conceptual apparatus and character armour consists of 'information' that without it there is a constant shiver between the shoulder blades. But it is also bracing and liberating: 'You don't have to look. / You can walk away. / There are stairs. // It's not really your place / to eat cake. / It's more of an excuse.' Jill Jones has done poets and their readers a great favour.

In Cassandra Atherton's Exhumed (Grand Parade Poets, $21.95 pb, 86 pp, 9780987129192), the allusions have too much dust on them to brush off. Or else they are the dust: it's not always easy to tell. The book is introduced by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, describing the conditions of the manuscript of his poems he had buried with his wife, on a romantic impulse and then shamefacedly retrieved six years later. It is the romance in this scenario that enlivens Exhumed, rather than the tawdriness. There are many texts interred within the book, to the point where they may just as well be a kind of humus interring the poet, nourishing her, and adding literary spice to her love life, which is the actual matter of the book.

The poems, the book, have a wild effervescence, which is youthful in its passion and enthusiasm, but contained by the skill of the narratives in these prose poems, and far too darkly erotic too often to be thought jejune by anyone. Her lover takes almost as many guises as there are writers, characters, painters, actors to allude to, as does she. The White Rabbit, for instance: 'I want to be swaddled in Gladwrap and slowly suffocate in his scent. Draw arrows on my neck pointing to his teeth marks. I delight in the marks he leaves on my body. But he is always late and I'm never his important date. So I set my watch to Daresbary time and wear it to bed.'

'Daresbary time' is really too much, too Wikipedian, but she gets away with it, miraculously avoiding feyness at every turn, as she does throughout the book. Mostly she achieves this through a kind of surreal physicality, where the carnality is so convincing one accepts the prmise. Two lovers, for example, tracing each other on the tracing paper that lies between them like a sheet, 'The tracing paper crinkles. It is a thin barrier between us. But I can see you beneath it. I can just make out your shape. Outline. Like a crime scene. My unbroken pencil-thin line and you my victim.'  The 'intertexts' that she buries or exhumes in her poems (in this case Magritte, Coleridge, Gwen Harwood, and Kay Kyser) are like shards of pottery found in a garden: when dug up, they are just pieces, but glinting in the soil they have endless promise.

Reviewer's chance often makes strange companions, but these three books collude to argue, confound, and charm, somehow finding a minor key that suits them all.