A risk for poets who are committed environmentalists is evangelism or, conversely, bland resignation. Sometimes here, as in the poem ‘Words & Numbers’, triggered by the desecration of Tasmania’s forests, the effect is more like an Environmental Impact Statement. Indeed, the sequence ‘Tasmania: A Green Guide’, appears somewhat facile, banal, lacking poetic craft and originality of language. ‘The stink of disappointment still rises / over the forests of Tasmania’ is less than memorable poetry. A strong contrast to these poems fortunately appears in Crisp’s evocations of Provence and Gippsland, as in the sequences ‘Waterholes’ and ‘Uplands’. When she uses the landscape imaginatively to convey ideas, the poetry is powerful rather than strident; anger over destruction at Mt Baldhead is transmuted into a potent minimal image: ‘By the side of the road / silver wattle stands / skinny as survival.’

Crisp’s affinity and spiritual communion with wild places, her heightened sensibility to the vibrant, nuanced world of nature, emerge strongly in the immediacy of poems such as ‘Lip’ with its wonderful rhythm and ‘Valley’ where ‘Words were / infrequent as rain’. Geographical and personal barriers disappear in a cosmic unity reminiscent of Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ poems, while prophetic echoes recall Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), as in ‘Variations on dry’: ‘after the rainforest / the farmland is empty / of birds // … their absence affects the night / creates a silence which goes on / looking for birds.’ Eloquent silence often resonates with ironic force in these understated poems.