Jenkins’s poem seems a direct response to Anderson’s pantoum ‘Quiet Ruin Is the Conversation of the Bulbs’, which contains lines such as ‘I believe in life after death because things always are, they always extend’.

Jenkins dedicates ‘Home Two Years Later’ to his late father. A visit to the old family home prompts a musical meditation on the ‘mysterious barricades’ of time, a theme that haunts this book:

You look at winter flowers and fed the stab.
Time beyond the white scent, falling
like cold, invisible rain ...

The third poem in this collection is ‘Weeping Woman’, dedicated to Barrett Reid, and it is in an entirely different vein – a jokey piece of Ekphrasis: ‘Do you like my face? These days, it’s passable. / But for years I looked a mess. That was when / I worked for Picasso.’

Jenkins lives at Kangaroo Ground on the outskirts of the Yarra Valley. The poems ‘Zoo Plankton’, ‘Middle Yarra Tributary’ and ‘Walking on the Water Tension’ rely on close observation of his local area – and I mean very close. a micro-vision that delights in scientific language, at times reminiscent of the writing of the Scottish polymathpoet Hugh MacDiarmid:

Shine to deeper nodes where stars split off,
where Stentor, a tiny ear trumpet anchored
by one foot, sucks in dumbstruck life. Here,
Hydra and Paramecium cut the millimetre
down to size ...

The most ambitious part of Dark River is ‘The Wine Harvest’ sequence, a group of seven long poems portraying the Yarra Valley through the seasons of work in the vineyards. Reflecting the poet’s affection for the area, and his firsthand knowledge of viticulture, his language is by turns muscular, technical and playful. Take, for example, the people described in terms of wine in the section ‘Ragged Fruiting Body’: Cassie is ‘blond as sauvignon’; and as for Luigi:

‘Got some pruning for ya,’ says Luigi, who is
loud, big-bodied and potential to mature,
though I sense a disappointment in himself,
a hint of acid only he can relish – perhaps aspires
to his own vineyard, Sangiovese cuttings.
‘l manage all of this,’ he says, ‘and I
manage! Ha ha!’ Volatility all his own,
with a mobile phone.

In this poem, each stanza finishes with a rhyming couplet, and during ‘The Wine Harvest’ sequence Jenkins plays with six-line stanzas, rough iambic pentameter, and references to Keats. It’s a great mix of laconic practicalities, seasonal atmospherics and joyfully precise language.

As well as rural settings, Dark River contains plenty of urban material and literary references laced with Jenkins’s characteristic sense of humour. Poems such as ‘AEIOU’, ‘Sydney Road Kebab’ and the ‘found poems’ in ‘Close Shaves’ brought a smile to this reader’s dial.

Time and memory are very much the concern of Brian Edwards in his first collection, All in Time. Edwards teaches at Deakin University and is the editor of the journal Mattoid; he has also published critical texts, including Theories of Play and Postmodern Fiction (1997). All in Time is divided into four sections, the first of which is full of references to high art: Màrquez, Homer, Sophocles, Monet, Cézanne, Shakespeare. This referential style continues throughout the book. The title poem is a work of Ekphrasis based on Dürer’s etching Knight, Death and the Devil. Edwards’s meditation on art and time follows a well-worn path – ‘For Time gets us all. / The sands are running’ – but with an engagingly casual chattiness: ‘Thanks. Dürer. We still look at your pictures. / The horse is a beauty.’

Section II is devoted to the long poem ‘Glenorchy’, a vivid, rambling assembly of characters and incidents from childhood in a small town in Victoria’s Wimmera district, reconstructed through a sustained act of memory. There are echoes here of Walt Whitman’s ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed’ and of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, with its occasional exhortations: ‘Listen!’ ‘Look!’ and the lists of townsfolk going about their affairs. ‘Why do they return so insistently, these dark figures / who invade the dreamscape ... ?’ Edwards asks rhetorically, only to proffer more listings, down to the number plate on an uncle’s car. I was sometimes left wondering if I needed to know these details. In a poem of this length, you begin wishing for a stronger narrative. Edwards provides hints: ‘Your little sister’s in the cemetery’, and stories from children’s literature are grafted onto childhood experiences. Perhaps he answers this complaint within the poem itself, with a bit of postmodern theory:

It seemed like the end of history.
But now he knew that time stuttered too,
that it could falter, whistle in the wind,
leave fragments in a room
or return cat-confident, and full of surprises.
Eternity is too big a concept.
So he came to prefer splinters of meaning,
keeping all grand stories on distant hold.

Edwards is a prosy poet, not particularly focused on sound or rhythm within the line, but more interested in the cumulative effect of heterogeneous details.

Section IІІ deals with travel and further references to other writers and poets. ‘Found in Salem’ is a type of haibun, with prose sections of travel diary notes inserted into stanzas of poetry, though the poetry never has the compression of true haibun.

Section IV returns the focus to Australia, but, as with Section I. it includes plentiful European and American cultural references. Edwards seems to see much of the world through his reading, often inserting literary names and quotes into his experiences. ‘Intertextuality’ you might call it, though it sometimes gives the writing a borrowed or academic feel.

The final poem in the collection, ‘A Dream of Origins’, returns us to the territory of ‘Glenorchy’: ‘How can we, / burglars of the past, / distinguish the place / from stories of the place?’ It is no surprise that we can’t. For Edwards, that’s a kind of credo.