Reading Jacket is a little like finding yourself in a labyrinth of conversation. Follow this thread through the current issue, for instance: read the extract from Lisa Jarnot’s biography of American poet Robert Duncan; then turn to Tranter’s 1985 interview with Duncan, where Duncan describes his meeting with Robert Adamson. From there, go to Michael Davidson’s discussion of how Duncan influenced Adamson; see how Duncan’s work was ‘the catalyst for conversations among poets on several continents’. As a digression, look at Davidson’s poem in this issue, and compare Duncan’s poems with Adamson’s ‘Eurydice Reads “Roots & Branches”‘. If you like it, turn to Adamson’s ‘Letter to Robert Creeley’ – perhaps the finest poem in this issue. Or follow a link to another site to hear Duncan’s and Creeley’s and Olson’s and Ginsberg’s 1963 discussion of poetry. Or read Landis Everson’s discussion of the Berkeley Renaissance in American poetry: ‘It really just meant, to me, a whole lot of poets.’

People often speak of poetry as a solitary undertaking. Tranter’s Jacket shows how it derives from conversations, allegiances and betrayals – from the human work of inheritance and innovation. Jacket is often playful but it is serious in this purpose: to serve as an archive not just for poems but for those poems’ particular worlds. Each issue offers a special feature: on the ‘Ern Malley’ hoax, on John Ashbery, on John Forbes, on Mina Loy; adding up to a modern encyclopedia of contemporary writing.

Jacket has no starting point and no end point. Its links lead you between articles, poems and reviews, from issue to issue, and to other sites. If you read it for long enough, you are likely to regard it as a form of time: exhausting, inexhaustible, made of promises and deferrals. Most of the poems that Jacket features depend upon this sense of time: they break syntax; they juxtapose fragments. Landis Everson’s poem in this issue, ‘At the Window’, is one of the finest examples of this form:

Insanity is a precious thing underan umbrella and grows like twisted vinesin our heads. Sometimes the rain comes downto tickle us and drown out our tears.The cows outside the institutionhave none of our fears. At the windowthe bars seem to shift shadowson the backs of the sweet beasts, andI wonder at the pastures of peaceful stupiditythat are always inside them to eat.Like zebras one moment, if the sunis just right with the bars, their made-upstripes dance, until the rains cometo put them out. I wonder whythese magic drops tickle when they don’thit me on the ears and like crinkled papergetting wet, the vines uncurl and grow straightuntil the rain stops and waits for the zebras.

With its disjunctions and odd felicitous connections, the Internet is peculiarly suited to this form. Jacket is remarkable, in this way, for its self-consistency; for an editorial stance that takes advantage of the particular conditions of the Internet – its endless ramifications; and in all that outer space, keeps its own world view.

The new literary journal, Space, on the other hand, is remarkable for the diversity of world views it represents – in its fiction, poetry, essays and reviews – until it seems to be only the fact of its binding that holds them together (and an attractive fact it is, too; Space is set out in the style of Heat, with photographs, this issue, from Graeme Kinross-Smith). Take the part called ‘Personal Space’: it has an essay on plagiarism from Justin Clemens, bristling with references and theories; a postmodern jeu d’esprit that includes words such as temporalisation, delocalisation and de-territorialised in a single sentence. Also, in ‘Personal Space’, you find an amiable reflection on place from Roy Hay; an essay made of reminiscences.

There are memorable stories in this issue; among them, Cate Kennedy’s haunting and homely ‘Moth Season’; Janis Spehr’s brutal and suddenly wistful ‘Love Letters in the Sand’; and Cassandra Atherton’s ‘Cherry bomb’ – imagine Lost in Translation on speed. If you were finding the soundtrack for these three stories, you would go from the call note of a red-capped robin (‘like the ticking of a clock or the gentle tapping of wood’) through Johnny Cash to ‘a male teen with blue-streaked hair [singing] punk rock in a silk dress over pants’. And why not? Space is quite a jukebox.

But the best part of Space this issue is its poetry. It has poems from Kevin Hart, Les Murray, Diane Fahey, Amari Hamadene, Ouyang Yu, Joan Kerr, Ian McBryde and Michael Brennan, and starts and ends with Philip Harvey’s meditations on Finnegans Wake in ‘wakese’, a loosely phonetic and madly associative language: ‘And what is a preface? A praytense, a protext? / Let me write you one preambling – ‘. And it has two poems of colliding words from Michael Farrell: howwe / takeworsh / ipup onourselvesinaformofesc / apism’ – poems that would exist happily in Jacket, where Farrell has also published. These sit alongside Diane Fahey’s delicate sonnets from her Barwon Heads sequence, poems on how a body can be part of a landscape and alone: ‘An unpeopled shore. The river bares / the pale gold stretch that was a cricket pitch / last week. Under the pier, an inky pool / whose curved warmth I could lie in – ‘ (‘To the Estuary’).

There are some translations from Ouyang Yu with clarity of line and floating endings: ‘Birds have vacated a thousand mountains / Footsteps erased from ten thousand paths / An old man in a boat, with a straw cape and a bamboo hat / Is fishing, alone, the cold snow.’

Michael Brennan’s long sequence of short-line, two-line stanzas also seems to come from a world that floats in time: ‘You tread along these alleys / In a thousand faces // As first drops of summer rain / Drum fingers on the black // Smile of the street, / The grey circus.’ (‘The roofs go down into the earth’). It is a form that gives up the driving force of rhythm for the power of those white spaces between words, for ‘fishing, alone, the cold snow’.

This issue also has three striking poems from Kevin Hart. Hart has written on Gwen Harwood, and his poems in this issue have her formal clarity with the kind of cumulative power that comes not from a single line or image but from the whole tide of thought that flows through them: ‘Say wood and everything is clean again. / The word is all around you, like the night, / Impossible to grasp. Your mouth is dark …’. Here, perhaps, is the ‘profound, associative insight’ that Noel Rowe is seeking in his broad-ranging review of Australian poetry – a review that also offers notes on how to write, complaining of ‘poetry trapped on the surface – the surface of observation, narration, language’.

Space offers all these slightly random delights – like the small biography in the midst of its notes on contributors: ‘Valentina Tereshkova was born in the Yaroslavl region of the former USSR. She was a textile worker, amateur parachutist and the first woman in space. She leads a quiet life in Moscow.’