Minter’s interests are, in fact, wide. Among other things, he lectures in Indigenous Studies at the University of Sydney; and the sources he cites range from rock to Chaucer. But I’ll come back to his Eliotic endnotes in the fullness of thought. What comes more importantly to us is the mingled poise, culture and movement of his verse. Minter’s feel for language is subtle, his breath generally short. He zigs and zags a good deal, sometimes to the reader’s discomfort. But there is a lovely intensity in many of these poems, and the volume as a whole is unobtrusively stitched together by the sonnets, or quasi-sonnets, that recur throughout. These also carry a great deal of the book’s surfy, erotic charge:

                               I was half-way there, surf-cap
                      histrionic, stars & little whelks
       gathered to my shin-wakes,
                      dolphins barreling upon the breakers’
       ersatz pervious romance. 

Hart Crane would have admired the linguistic zest of this, though I’m not sure he would have liked the ‘previous/pervious’ slippage. What is more, the ‘Yonder Sonnets’ are among Minter’s finest work so far.

Whatever of that, the book’s structural centre or Big Project is a suite entitled ‘Australiana’. These are loosely strung poems of different lengths and directions, beginning with echoes of Adam Lindsay Gordon, the doomed poet of horses. It is partly organised by the association of image-clusters: mouths, bones, rubbish, cloudage, water. More-over, its fourteen sections offer a connotative development concerning itself with relentless pollution of the environment. The sequence reaches a strange climax in a ceremony around the cremation of a dog, which is not, I think, the anagram of God: it remains no more than a very substantial dog that has died. In this section, the personal and the particular are clenched together.

This raises a particular, yet very common question about real experience, real creatures, real objects in late-modern art. How far are we to take their reality as there? What do the leading art forms of our time have to do with representation? The answer is that you can’t escape representation for long, and it seems that Minter is increasingly aware of this burden of reality, as his very title, Blue Grass, reminds us; even though the grasses on his cover are green and golden-brown. Thus, too, we are to believe that this powerful section of ‘Australiana’ is actually lamenting a pet that died after getting a rye-grass seed in its ear.

It would be naïvely linear to ask if the sick stockrider had a dog. The modes of association throughout this sequence are Cantoesque, or at least modernist, relying on the diagonal associations of strong, often glowing images: glimpses of a paradise that is commonly lost. As Minter writes in a section that is directly called ‘The Destruction of the Past’: ‘Someone reaches their hand out to cup the same red glow / ash falling back from the husk of the earth // as it rises burning in a thermal vacuum, light / fading over the great harbour.’ Lines of this character suggest something apocalyptic, both within and beyond the damage of history, its ‘dust at the back of my throat / as I wander emptied by hatred’. Hatred of whom, I wonder? Of modern developers, of settlers and what they did to the Aboriginal peoples, or of the industrial age itself? It is not necessary for us to have an answer, since we can register the neurasthenic force of the poet’s emotion. Indeed, I keep coming back to my sense that his ardour has a watery intensity like Hart Crane’s, though he is far less rhetorical than Crane. As he should be, seventy years later in artistic time.

One of the book’s unusual features consists in its four densely bunched pages of notes: these give rise to a degree of puzzlement. Unlike the Waste Land notes, they do not range far and wide across cultures; unlike William Empson’s, they do not unravel difficult concepts. Some are historically useful, like the note on Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks, or that on the Fresh Kills dump in post-9/11 Staten Island. But most of them only cross-refer within the small meadow of contemporary poetry. This adds little to the poet’s signalled echoes and appropriations. Rather, it feels like a habit imported from the academic life, and it slightly weakens the power of Blue Grass (Salt Publishing, $29.95 pb, 115 pp).

But it is easy and proper to concentrate on the poetry itself: the ‘Knitcap Sutras’, for instance, twelve-liners in which Minter’s love for nature’s fine bright lineaments and ‘thick fruit knuckles’ makes itself strongly felt.