A glimpse of all this can be enjoyed in ‘Anonymous’, a poem short enough to quote in full: ‘What about the chestnut tree in the cemetery, / replete with foliage, erecting / countless steeples of blossoms – / each consisting of images / that capture the essence in a couple of strokes, / a dash of red and yellow on white – / and the perfect fragments / blown to the grass? / Does anyone else / come here to see them, / the displays of this artist / unknown even to herself.’

Though ‘Anonymous’ is a less ‘ambitious’ poem than many in the collection, it is also characteristic. Typically, it poses a kind of philosophical problem and then, based on close observation, goes on to ‘expand the present’ via a series of images, each with its own implications. The settings of the poems in A Personal History of Vision range widely, with a particular focus on Switzerland, Sicily, and Sydney. All of them combine to embody the coherent aesthetic that Fischer’s title implies.

Robert Adamson’s endorsement of Susan Fealy’s first full-scale collection, Flute of Milk (, $22.99 pb, 76 pp, 9781742589398), is rather grand but not far off the mark. ‘Delicate, tough, sensual, spiked with ideas and lines that create the deep music of real poetry.’ The poems are indeed compressed, worldly, often oblique (told on the ‘slant’, as Emily Dickinson recommended) and sometimes risking the opaque. Fealy’s loose and brief take on Baudelaire’s ‘La Voix’ is an index to at least one of her inspirations.

A few lines from the title poem, ‘Flute of Milk’, may be a more reasonable guide to the book as a whole. ‘I remember the butter churn – / the handle I never turned. / Memory prefers to hold things still, / but the past, present and future / are a long flute of milk.’ We start in the real world of a childhood dairy; then move to a generalisation about memory and time, culminating in an illustrative image. The ‘flute of milk’ is a bold metaphor but also a risky one. We have to assume the poet is referring to a champagne flute, yet the musical instrument also comes to mind, rather messily. Fealy describes her poem, in a note, as ‘a conversation with John Banville’s The Sea’, but this reader of both the novel and the poem found the link obscure. These are the sorts of risks the French symbolists were willing to take but which Fealy may well retreat from in future collections.

In the book’s second half there are other poems where Fealy’s compression is matched by a directness that cleverly stops short of the obvious. ‘Instructions for Weaning a Baby’ is a good example with its almost brutal opening line (‘Tell her it’s overrated’) and the rich succession of later images such as ‘Tell her, in the morning the sea is milk’ and ‘Tell her, in full summer, naked on a beach, / the sun drenching her skin is not unlike / a flood of milk’.

Another no less memorable poem is ‘Metamorphosis’, Fealy’s tribute to Franz Kafka. It is a villanelle, one of the key lines being ‘A jackdaw is kavka in Czech’. The poem’s rough but insistent music remains a disturbing evocation of what happened to the Jews of Central Europe under the Nazis. ‘His sisters Elli, Valli and Ottla / died in forty-one, two and three.’

Judy Johnson’s Dark Convicts: Ex-slaves on the First Fleet ($22.99 pb, 139 pp, 9781742589183) is a livre composé focused on two of her convict ancestors, both ex-slaves who were freed by the British when they escaped their masters and joined the Loyalist army during the American Revolution. Unfortunately, that was the end of British generosity and they were both transported to New South Wales for petty larceny in the First Fleet. John Martin married Mary, the daughter of his friend and fellow ex-slave, John Randall. Judy Johnson, estimates there are now roughly 25,000 Australian descendants of her two black ancestors.

The poems mainly concern Johnson’s two forebears, Martin and Randall, but gradually widen out to include Australia’s first bushranger, Black Caesar, and a more general portrait of the brutality (and hypocrisies) of convictism. Nearly all the poems are written in a thirteen-syllable line which works surprisingly well considering poets in English over the centuries have generally preferred the pentameter to the hexameter. At times, Johnson also employs a kind of anapaestic metre within this format. She frequently uses rhyme schemes which (like Jordie Albiston’s) place the rhyming words mid-line.

A fair example of Johnson’s approach at its most effective can be found in ‘John Martin’s Twenty Five Lashes’. ‘... The first lash tears open thin skin. The flogger / clears the gore with his fingertips to make sure     the next // lash     will let those knots dig in ...’ It is not hard to feel Johnson’s personal identification with her ancestors here.

Dark Convicts is a graphic (and, at times, ironic and entertaining) account of our more-complex-than-previously-thought colonial origins. It also illustrates, yet again, how well poetry is suited to narrative purposes.