Who are the authors of these ‘autographs’? There’s no easy answer to this question: the poems bespeak innumerable and sometimes overlapping voices, some in the first, some the second, some the third person, and few of the ‘autographers’ actually bear a name. This weave of voices is akin to the souls who populate the ‘infinite city’ of Skovron’s verse collection, Infinite City (1999) – an ambiguous and uncanny place, reminiscent of Calvino’s Magic Realism, without spatial, temporal or imaginative limit.

This infinitude moves one narrator to ‘sing’ of ‘The city’s endlessness, the soul’s profusion’. In Autographs, ‘The city breathes in time with the music of myriad souls.’ Music is a pervasive motif and structural principle in Skovron’s writing, where it can ‘sing’ transcendence but also convey labyrinthine darkness, containment, moral entropy.

Autographs has many registers. There are poems about evil and moral decay; about time and memory (key Skovron themes); there is satire, social critique, parable, eroticism, metaphysical rumination; and, as in much of Skovron’s work, there are two strands of autobiographical narrative: one, a disembodied voice whose history and identity we yearn but often fail to know; the other, a recognisably ‘personal’ voice of self-signature, as when Skovron recalls his early childhood in Poland or his migrant years in Australia. A boy on his bike ‘cuts a line along ramshackle laneways littered with bins and fallen palings, he carves a loop past the war memorial, the park, the terraces pigeoned with time’. The sharpness and inventiveness (‘pigeoned’) of such descriptions, and the beautifully managed transitions between them, make for an endlessly absorbing reading experience. None of the poems occupies more than a page, yet each is satisfying in its self-sufficiency and is suggestively linked to those around it. The prose suggests the interior narrative shape of the vignette, but the language, with its rich metaphoric life and delicate phrasing, is finely crafted poetry. ‘Shadow’, the title poem of the second section, gathers many of the volume’s threads into twenty-two lines. A mysterious figure, the keeper of the Registry of Dreams, must ‘catalogue and annotate’ the ‘day-and-nightly rubrics of the soul’ – presumably the souls of others. When he dreams – four lines separate the slant rhyme of ‘dream’ and ‘might-have-been’ – his unconscious seems to release him from his soul-numbing chore. But does it? He dreams ‘a single dream’, ‘a stupendous fugue of the uncounted voices’, of those he has not yet catalogued. This is not the music of transcendence but of containment; a summons to keep cataloguing the ‘long-forgotten archives of the self’. According to a typically arresting conceit, the dream ‘nourishes the planet of his heart, corrects its orbit – so that when he wakes, he will want only to resume his craft, continue to retrieve and gloss and catalogue …’ The craft, the music, the dream, the vast reaches of space – all are here deceiving simulacra of the virtues that fire Skovron’s writing – creativity, transcendence, enchantment, aliveness to the moment (in ‘Dance’, he writes ‘keep it strange, so the mere moment can sing’).

Like all fine poetry, Skovron’s ultimately defies paraphrase. It would be too easy to say that in Autographs ‘dream’ stands against ‘calculation’. Their relationship varies from poem to poem, so that what we see – or rather experience – is an array of possible relations, connections and implications, all of which continue to unfold as we read.

Skovron’s art is in the best sense inconclusive. Another of his favourite motifs, the labyrinth, might imply ultimate containment, imprisonment; but the poem by that name reminds us that for those whose knowledge runs deep the labyrinth has an exit: ‘Soul of memory, the flame that lights the labyrinth to the library, the home within.’ The ‘home within’ is the ever-evolving self and its identity-conferring memories. It is this that the keeper of the Registry of Dreams cannot tabulate. In the last four lines of ‘Shadow’, an autobiographical voice makes its entry. The keeper will ‘never glimpse’ or ‘recall the child I was, the little boy who ran, the youth who kissed, the paper conjurer destined to shadow him. That dream is mine alone.’ The keeper’s labyrinth imprisons; the dreamer’s ‘autograph’ sings of the soul’s emancipation.