For all his breeziness and his cosmopolitan zest, Hill is a Romantic with a capital R. Of the book’s three major sections, two concern what might be called Romantic Revolution. ‘Getting the Revolution Straight’ concerns European radicalism from Shelley through Lenin; ‘The Prince’ centres around Antonio Gramsci; and the final section, ‘Approaching Siddhartha’, examines the cross-cultural Romanticism of Westerners understanding India.

Hill’s perspective, though, is not a generic one. Indeed, his guardedly sanguine stance towards Marxism makes this book seem almost counter-factual with respect to the years 1996–2006 as we have known them. These are not poems by a middle-aged, cosmopolitan poet about the contemporary scene, but an alternate history of what such a poet and scene might be if the history of the past generation had turned out differently. Indeed, the first poem looks back with measured sentiment towards a lapsed Old Left: ‘That was the time of solid stories / Of organising rather than mourning.’

Yet Hill gives us present-day history; the tacit, and sometimes explicit, addressee of the poems is Hill’s son, and in many ways the book operates as a testimony of the political beliefs of the majority of Hill’s baby boomer generation, what can be preserved and learned from them despite some undeniable mistakes in immediate political terms. In ‘Getting the Revolution Straight’, the poet not only addresses the reader but his subject, Lenin:

You don’t scud in Revolution
Let alone permanent Rapids yet.
You’ve hardly looked at Trotsky
Any more than you have
Blood on your hands.

Lenin is a figure suspended between actuality and perspective, ‘Skimming on the Neva of our family Dreaming’. We see a latter-day Australian looking at Lenin, not a dramatic monologue written from within Lenin’s psyche. The Neva Dreaming line, with its unforced braiding of Russian river and indigenous Australian ontology, is one that can typify and even epitomise Hill’s technique in this volume. There is a garrulous charm combined with overtones of Marxist political nostalgia: Les Murray meets Frank Hardy. In the early section of ‘Getting the Revolution Straight’, names – Trotsky, Pushkin, Mayakovsky – are repeated in a patterned way, which might suggest that Hill is smuggling in a sestina amid the crisp vers libre of his sprightly stanzas. Not so; but he is attentive to the interaction of words, how the dance of language requires both variation and repetition that give the reader the sense of an intricate composition.

The Gramsci sequence is less magniloquent, and works its effects in the trenches of life:

Not that he is a saint – no
                   I am fundamentally a practical person
                   Hands still work – look!
They dig, write, raise knife and fork
   One hand still scratches
      The other

Hill’s chiselled passage, troped by the shape it assumes on the page, might pose the question of what an organic intellectual of the middle class would be like. ‘On Reading the Late Poems of Milosz’ can be said to moot this question, as the poet compares his relatively untroubled life with the life of the Polish poet who concluded that ‘some words, some / Truths are too cruel to reveal to the human heart’. The way three very different writers are channelled together in ‘The Prince’ – Gramsci’s Marxism, Milosz’s mystical anti-totalitarianism and D.H. Lawrence’s instinctualism of place – is a tour de force of irenic harmonisation.

The poet’s perception of the dust of Varanasi, the allure of Bollywood, and the ‘green valley’ of the Buddhist pilgrimage site of Bodhgaya is enabled by this substrate of a basic openness with respect to immediate, minute experience. (The volume is itself a cross-cultural enterprise, published by Paper Tiger Press, based in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai; the book is superbly produced).

Many of the non-sequential poems at the beginning of the book also take place in India; others meditate on the war in Iraq, in a manner reminiscent of, though far less indignant than, Jennifer Maiden’s poems on the subject. ‘Under the Sign of Necessity’ explains the book’s title: a sense of interconnection, but also a sage unwillingness to mistake the necessary links between the experiences of the poet and individuals he observes for any sense of aesthetic hegemony over them: ‘A song must have linked the rickshaw men. / But then I had to turn away – / Neither knowing their poem / Nor the wars they might be in.’

Hill’s erudite poise gives the reader a sense of worldly edification. But it is the willingness to know the limits of aesthetic observation that is this fine volume’s true strength.