Hampton’s playfulness, evident in earlier poems such as ‘Varieties of Crabs’, ‘Derrida is Dead’ and ‘Waiting for Goliath’, reaches rollicking heights as the sisterhood ‘on holiday’ – the Furies, the Sybil, the Harpies and the Muses – see the sights, or hang out at a backpackers’ hostel. Their view of Australian contemporary life is composed of broad brushstrokes: big merinos, big pineapples, Macworlds, ‘Virgin’ phones and ‘Oracle’ software. Tisiphone, searching for her ‘kindly’ self, attempting to forsake the ancient codes of vengeance for forgiveness, finds in our modern world – its wars, terrorism, murders, accidents – too much of the same. The moral confusions, the wanton cruelties erode her sense of purpose in being her ‘kindly’ post-colonial self. Love may offer redemption, but Tisiphone knows too well its fragility and how easily she too might wake from her dream state to harsh daylight. Better to stick with what she knows, better to remain in darkness, better to enjoy the visceral pleasures of the occasional Dionysian orgy and the opportunity for a little time out from the self.

Tisiphone’s holiday in the modern world offers a trans-cendent view of human nature. Are we inescapably colonised by our past, our history, our myths, our genes? In its fusion of mythical and modern worlds, its exploration of vengeance and forgiveness, its female sensibilities, its ironies, wit and pace, this is a verse narrative to be savoured.

Journeying across time and place, fusing the past and the present, is also a feature of Margaret Bradstock’s Coast, a book in five parts. Her initial poetic destinations are those of the early explorers of Australia’s coastline. Each poem, prefaced by a diary extract, is Bradstock’s imagining of first sightings and first contacts.

The inevitable loss of life and grief that dogged these journeys is tenderly given voice as Matthew Flinders laments the disappearance of George Bass: ‘My words drop like stone anchors / or the rubbish / left by Trepang harvesters.’ In ‘Clothes Maketh the Man?’, Bradstock uses a first-contact encounter as metaphor: ‘Aborigines poked at / the marine’s tight breeches. / King ordered his men // and the first white cock / (not the last) / was flashed on Australian shores.’ The poet’s strength here is in simply allowing the historical moment to provide a succinct and striking evocation of the rapacity later unleashed upon the Aboriginal people as Europeans did indeed ‘settle the matter’.

The poems in Parts Two, Three and Four are grounded in the contemporary world, mostly Sydney and Byron Bay and the poet’s personal experience; melancholy often underlies these poems, and memory infuses all: ‘nets dot the dark water, / hauling in a past.’ The dispiriting urban landscape, the loss of childhood innocence, the transience of life, and the indignities and hopelessness imposed upon the vulnerable are central themes. Their counterpoints are small joys, luminous images of natural beauty, humour, irony and a voice of protest that is in itself a hope for better times. Bradstock pulls no punches in her politically focused poems. While ‘Tampa Solution’ predictably points a finger directly at the government, it also points at us, the suburban ‘empty heart of Australia’. The poet is seen at her lyrical best in two poems focused on personal memories, ‘Mahogany Ship’ and ‘How Like the Past’.

‘Sculpting In Time’, Part Five, presents poems that arose out of Bradstock’s Asialink residency in Beijing during 2003. In these, the breadth of her subject matter conveys the complexity of a world in which the ancient, the Maoist and the modern churn together on a daily basis. Others, such as ‘Mid-Autumn Festival: Quinhai Lake’, are more restrained and imagist, in a manner typical of Chinese poetry of the Li Po school. ‘Still Life with Rain’, written toward the end of Bradstock’s residency, is another example of this style, and of the poet’s heightened lyricism when reflecting upon personal experience.