To have produced eight books already before the half-century mark suggests a trajectory in which a good deal more may be expected. Hetherington will have to be reckoned with in subsequent accounts of contemporary Australian poetry. What will be the terms of that reckoning? This new book may offer some vantage points from which to discern them. One of the first things one notices about Hetherington’s poetry is the confluence of form and manner: his poems incline to classical verse schemes – sonnets, quatrains, balanced stanzas – while his style is similarly lucid in voice, diction and image. This felicitous combination gives his poems the feel of poise, intelligence, grace and finish. Thus ‘Love and Music’ begins, ‘There is breath, the unwieldy shape of lives, / and the sunflower outside the window, swaying’. Or ‘Prep-School Boarder, Aged Nine’: ‘This is not for him a ray of sunlight / but a piercing shaft of loneliness, / this green leaf no symbol of new beauty / but of green ache settling in young bone.’ We note, too, that many of the poems scan metrically – though not regular – working off the normative cadence of iambic rhythm. The verse is polished without being formalistic. This is most evident in his many sonnets (eighteen in all), where he generally conforms to the conventional length and shape but jettisons the rhyme or sometimes deploys it just enough to give an overall sense of its effect, as in the poem ‘Reading’, where there are three pairs of rhymes, or in ‘Dressing,’ where there are four.

Any insouciant note struck throughout is belied, however, by the artisanal care that attends Hetherington’s verse. His poems are carefully controlled and always unfold with an acute sense of the poetic line as a unit of composition. But, as Emerson points out, ‘it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem’; a mastery of form is not enough: there must be a thought ‘passionate and alive’ that instigates and sustains the effort. And here is where we find another characteristic of Hetherington’s poems, what, in another context, he refers to simply as ‘depth’ in certain writers: where, in reading their work, we are ‘aware that much more thought and feeling lies behind them than they express. And part of this implicit charge of knowledge, like an electrical current that animates the writing, is an awareness of contradiction; of how, within the expression of one point of view, or one feeling, other viewpoints and feelings lie buried and are equally alive.’ That quotation comes from an article Hetherington wrote on the painter Donald Friend, in his capacity as the primary editor of the published Diaries. What Hetherington says of Friend could be said of his own sense of writing, as in the opening of ‘Settling’: ‘As each meaning settles / there’s another, skimming / on the poem’s surface.’ This is why his poems frequently have an air of mystery to them, as if something is always held back, in reserve, potent and even unsettling. ‘You walk back,’ he says in ‘Still There’, ‘insisting that it’s there, all you imagine, / that no-one except you could now believe.’ At times this seclusion of meaning makes it difficult to get a fix on Hetherington the poet, in his guise as the lyric ‘I’ of the poem. There are certainly recurring concerns, such as the problematic adequacy of language to experience, or the nightmare eruptions of violence and war, or the exactitude of intimacy and love. But the thematic consistency doesn’t cohere into a singular person. We sense a multiplicity.

And here, again, we may have recourse to something Hetherington says in his article about Friend, when he invokes Emily Dickinson, who famously cautioned Thomas Wentworth Higginson not to take her poems as strictly personal: ‘When I state myself as the Representative of the Verse – it does not mean – me – but a supposed person.’ Hetherington goes on to say, ‘Friend, too, is a “supposed person” in his diaries in the sense that he creates a persona; a speaking voice which represents him as he wishes to be and which, despite its frankness, also partly obscures him.’ Hetherington, here, is drawing on his own thoroughgoing analysis of this phenomenon, dating back to his 1989 doctoral dissertation, ‘The Representative of the Verse’: Death, crisis and versions of the self in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, where he argues that the radical degree of irony and self-awareness in Dickinson renders her poems so complex and elusive that we are constrained to treat her presentation of herself as a series of dramatised personae, and not as the transcriptions of an autobiographical self.

This, I think, is key to an understanding of Hetherington’s poems or voices. He, too, is the representative of his verse, and not the other way around. It is perhaps underscored by the occasional presence of Dickinson in his own work, as in ‘Someone May Ask,’ which stages the imagined death of the speaker in a room, much like Dickinson’s ‘I heard a Fly buzz – when I died’, or in his poem ‘Evening’, where he uses rhyme and off-rhyme in taut quatrains. But what Hetherington really takes from Dickinson is the necessary freedom to invent, to test hypotheses and to explore differing modes of consciousness. This is not an evasion of the self, but a recognition of its intricacies and possibilities. Such analysis may feel like disbelief – as the book title suggests – but in the end, we leave as true believers in the accomplishment of the verse.