The idea of ‘perfection’ runs through the collection, the word itself or its synonyms occurring at least a dozen times in the more than seventy poems. In ‘Prevelly Seascape’, McCauley presents himself as a painter manqué, perhaps offering us an idea of his own writerly credo: ‘horizon / slightly but perfectly off-centre’ and ‘the neatness of nature’s boundaries / which an artist struggles to duplicate’. Contrasting is ‘The Art of Sumi Painting’, where art is not mimetic, enslaved to representation: ‘Is reality, after all, anything / more than ink with some creating hand / perfectly in control? / ... / Five simple steps and an iris / has blossomed on the silk; / with only three, loquats / have ripened beyond all withering.’ Art is generative rather than comparative.

But the first few poems in the collection pull the reader into more irrational modes of ‘violent rapture’. ‘Atavism’ echoes Glassmaker’s epigraph from C.P. Cavafy about the artist loving both vice and virtue equally: ‘On the days when he awoke as a werewolf / he would try to give his roses extra / attention …’ McCauley is interested in the four ‘T’s of mutability: translucence, transmutation, transformation and transcendence.

In McCauley’s love poems, time and mortality provide an elegiac context, as in ‘Oyster Eaters’: ‘Behind us our bed lay like a breaking / wave, frozen snapshot of our roistering’ or ‘Love in the Afternoon’: ‘this is all / the revelation we may ever get / or need.’ Despite his affirmation that ‘It is Always Today’, he writes ‘the cobweb past tears softly within’. The Klimt poems are rich and suggestive, but need knowledge of the paintings for full effect. ‘Three Ages of Women’ has a particularly good sense of the child (‘eyelids pale new leaves’), mother (‘one nipple peering from your breast’s mist’) and grandmother (‘grey hair / a waterfall’). ‘Danae’, too: ‘It is at first uncertain / whether the strange torrent of coins / is entering or leaving / this triumphant architecture / of your body.’

Sometimes McCauley tries too hard for effect as at the end of ‘China’. His best poems are both contemplative and decorative. On the whole they enact a worldly prayerfulness: ‘Take us in your kiss / Oh God … / take us at an ordinary moment …’

Geology, Kevin Murray’s second collection, is half the length of the previous two, a much more non-descript dragon than McCauley’s (the cover art comes from floor tiles). The poetry is austere, wry, often concerned to interrogate history (e.g. Robert Bourke, Westgate Bridge 1970, ANZAC) and the world (e.g. Suva, Spain, Carlton). Although, in ‘Home and Away’, the I ‘finds solace in Marx’s thesis – / our social being determines our consciousness’, Murray’s poems are mostly dominated by the ‘hum of the sovereign Self’.

At the centre of this small volume are two poems that show the strengths of Murray’s poetry: ‘Uncle at the Wedding’ reimagines ‘that damned wedding’ in Madama Butterfly from the point of view of her ageing Uncle Bonze, a cynic who accepts the ‘town’s busy pimp’s’ view of the nuptials as a ‘fraud with its get-out / clause’ but who is attracted to American whisky. The guests ‘fawn upon the gaigin’, while the uncle ‘lag[s] to take a leak, inscribing a grey rock in sosho script’. Framed by a darkening Nagasaki and the ‘butcher-reckoning’ of the aria ‘One fine day’, this is a poem with clever post-colonial innuendoes, held in a firm stanza structure.

More whimsically, ‘Rest Home’ constructs a surreal retirement: ‘sold up the house and moved into / the local supermarket.’ This is a more successful flâneur poem than others in this volume, less forced and self-indulgent. The idea of ‘yearning to disengage from untidy autumns, / melancholy dusks …’ and occupying the deserted aisles, as a ‘gardener to the root-bound seedlings’, shows Murray’s wit and play with language. Murray’s poems are often mischievous and local, as in the opening poems about modern urban life: ‘On Living Alone: A Guide’ and ‘8 Items or Less’, or the sorbet opening to ‘Bird’s Eye View’: ‘The house is a machine for living in.’ Murray is most jaunty when he juxtaposes the sexual innuendoes and energy of jazz, synechdochised in ‘jelly roll’ against the ‘beige bourgeois’ of a Classic FM presenter.

The cover of Max Richards’ Catch of the Day is a friendly dragon, with a welcoming, almost childlike illustration by Iain Topliss. The final stanza of the last poem in Catch of the Day, ‘Before My Time: Old Snaps’, shows both the successful and the problematic in Richards’ poems. There is an arresting brevity which works in the opening line and a half: ‘He was young, he aged, I lost him scarcely known. / The snaps are on file.’ The next line, however, is prosaic, explanatory: ‘I pay and know / they’re emailed to me in Melbourne.’ The final two lines are insistent and overstated: ‘Where now I sit (older than he ever was), / still not grieving, grasping at words.’

Richards’ poems are often witty, as in ‘The Retiree in inter’, with its simile linking burning dead leaves to office files, and the resolve: ‘Finished with work / I have made my will: / cremation, of course; / … / to my son, axe and saw; / to my daughter, potting mix; / to my wife, my urn.’ But the first half dozen poems in Catch of the Day are too vernacular – they lack much intensity or playing with language and would benefit from editing (especially ‘Pride and Joy’). I know there is an immediacy in the mundane and personal, but these poems often stumble in the prosaic and become rambling anecdotes or diffuse narratives, too casual to compel. ‘Watching out for Cygnets’ begins well, but gets bogged down in detail and becomes pompous at the end: ‘all I can do is practise arts of peace.’

Having over the summer read through the thirty or so poetry collections (where I encountered some truly astonishing dragons) submitted for this year’s Mary Gilmore Prize (to be awarded at the ASAL conference in Perth), I was disappointed to conclude that only Glassmaker would have made my shortlist.