It all smacks somewhat of desperation, and it soon becomes apparent why: the books aren’t very good. If they have worth, it is in helping us to identify tendencies increasingly prevalent in modern poetry – tendencies which, for many readers, will seem antithetical to poetry per se. Two sonnets, both by David Kirkby, and a sequence of haiku by Shen are all that exist in the way of forms, though the absence of established schemes and metres is far from being the point. There’s just so little technique. Here, for example, are the opening lines of ‘Japanangka’s Dog’, the first poem in Kirkby’s Spinifex (Five Islands Press, $9.95 pb and 32 pp):

Reversing out from
the Lajamanu store
there came a bump,
a single strangled yelp,
and the certain knowledge
that at last
I had hit a dog.

If this is a joke about what a critic once called ‘the enactment fallacy’, it would have been less funny coming at the end of the book, by which point Kirkby’s lazy style looks rather less like wry detachment and more like basic incapacity. One is left feeling, in any case, that this poetry is an enactment of sorts: set largely in the northern outback, it is dry and lifeless as the desert itself. Many of the poems deal with the Aboriginal communities in which the poet has worked, and one comes to feel that the language reflects a kind of embarrassment. In a poem about the painter Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Kirkby feels uneasy about a posthumous showing of her work in an Adelaide gallery. The gallery, perhaps, is paradigmatic: for Kirkby, this business of writing poetry is all just ‘marble floors and music’.

If anything unites these six New Poets, it is a kind of Anti- Formalism, a sense that certain content is so important as not to require technique at all. Cate Kennedy, whose Signs of Other Fires (Five Islands Press, $9.95 pb and 32 pp) was inspired by time spent working in Mexico, feels typically impotent.

The heaviest book by far is Lesley Fowler’s Crossing the Sky (Five Islands Press, $9.95 pb and 32 pp). Profoundly morbid (and morbidly profound), it ranges across such subjects as suicide, the Holocaust, cannibalism and the death of loved ones. The opening sequence is ‘Burials’, the title of which not only points up the funereal theme but also anticipates the mental exhumations attendant upon its exploration. That Fowler has practised as a psychotherapist therefore comes as no surprise. The organising principle of her poems is emotional. The content is the form.

If a child died
the mother hid the body
collected its rations
for the living

(‘Pictures of Terezin’)

Sheridan Linnell (Cutting Room, Five Islands Press, $9.95 pb and 32 pp) has worked as an arts therapist: ‘another poet yawned at me / she’s sick of this victim shit // child abuse has been overdone / common as measles’ (‘done over’). These lines are instructive. If the yawning poet makes the mistake of thinking that poetry outgrows certain subject matter, or that subject matter can be proscribed at all, Linnell mistakenly thinks that some subjects are so important as to carry the day by themselves. Ruskin knew that the worth of a poet depends on two faculties: acuteness of feeling and command of it. Linnell wants her feelings to do all the work, and consequently fails. A poem can express, but is not written out of, any extreme emotion.

When the feelings become the method, so poetry becomes, itself, a species of therapy, but therapy for the poet, not for the reader. One feels uneasy, therefore, about the inclusion of so many gruesome details, especially when, as in ‘done over’, the details are lifted from another life. Students used to argue about Sylvia Plath and her ‘Nazi lampshade’, but the debate, it appears, has ended. These lines from Shen’s City of My Skin (Five Islands Press, $9.95 pb and 32 pp) are illustrative of the general trend, and constitute a sort of inadvertent allegory of it, too. (Shen, by the way, is a general practitioner, so don’t panic!)

Their lungs draw no air, but
sometimes, I am still startled to hear
the beating of a heart
when the stethoscope is pressed
to their pallid chests.
But I realise that it’s only
the rushing of my own blood in my ears …

(‘Certifying the dead’)

And talking of drawing breath, what of the physical side of verse? As poetry focuses more on the mind, so it becomes less of an oral art. It is a depressing fact of literary life that many of the poetry readings one attends, far from restoring poetry to the status of living language, are entirely given over to the kind of poetry that needn’t be read out at all. What technique there is in New Poets 8 tends to be typographical rather than sonic. Here, for example, is Terry Jaensch (Five Islands Press, $9.95 pb and 32 pp):

the acidity of our lips / has made of our faces
a vacancy / / of adjoining rooms / -1- room

the static contour of y(our) cheek caught in the
fall-out / beneath the tight wire of y(our) hair

(‘Munch: The Kiss’)

However one gets a poem like that, it’s not by hearing it read aloud.

Perhaps the home computer is to blame. If so, then it’s a pity that the fastidiousness with which these poets explore their formatting options does not extend to switching on their grammar checkers. Mistakes by Jaensch and Kennedy make one wonder less about the health of poetry than about the state of English teaching in schools. And might there be some software one can install to weevil out tautologies? David Kirkby’s ‘neat concentric halo rings like ripples in a lake’ is what Martin Amis would call ‘a train wreck line’.

Clive James once wrote that ‘while not everything looks like a prose sentence, anything can pass for a line of verse’. This can be a weakness, but it is also poetry’s strength. When, however, such acts as pass for poems in these six books are perpetrated, one is tempted to invoke a definition – to say, indeed, ‘this isn’t poetry’. That would be a pointless thing to do. The good stuff speaks for itself, and publishers are wrong if they think we can’t tell it from the bad. No matter who is on the back cover.