It is hard not to think of Wallace Stevens when reading The Kangaroo Farm. There is the similar interest in the ‘gaudiness’ of poetry: ‘Dawnlight: a flamingo slab / where Assyrian glyphs floated in tree silhouettes’ (‘A Month in the Country’). There are the metaphors of humanity rendered from the inhuman world of things: ‘It’s the blades of black swan’s wings on shining water / bulky fragment floating where you loitered / watching time go by: yes, in that Sepulcrum // mortis of what was fair or good, of what should have worked out or of what X did to Y’(Saintliness’). But most particularly, it is the interest in the relationship between the real and the imagined: the self and the world.

Both George and Martin J, Harrison have used the word ‘maya’ (the former ‘Beware of Darkness’) and it is not surprising to find it used by the latter. In Hindu philosophy maya refers both to magic and ‘the illusion or appearance of the phenomenal world’ (SOED2). Martin Harrison expresses it in ‘The Platypus’ as ‘that dream, where illusion’s both true / and false’. It is an apposite word for Harrison’s poetry as a whole. While he doesn’t labour the point. Harrison is concerned with the ‘magic’ of poetic sight and sound; with our everyday perception being stretched almost to the point of nonperception (remember Stevens’s, the poem ‘must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully’). Also, Harrison is constantly going over his tracks to find the objective – the thing itself – amid the subjective: the world in the self as much as the elf in the world.

This occurs in two of the collection’s best poems: ‘A Month in the Country’ and ‘Moon Gazing in Sorrento Dusk’. In the former, the poet is looking after some friends’ house. The meditation on the country, the ‘professional dreams’ that rely on Pajeros and mobile phones, and the heat, give way abruptly (at the thought of a cool change) to a meditation on the poet’s mother and his grief for her loss. The metaphors are not wholly related to the earlier meditations, but neither are they wholly disjunct. It is as if we are seeing the process as it happens.

‘Moon Gazing in Sorrento Dusk’ is the collection’s strongest moment: a dense, meandering poem, where the use of the long line seems most adept. It is written in memory of an earlier Australian pastoral poet, Roland Robinson, and one can see the affinities immediately (despite their differences). Harrison’s success here is that he writes so much and so well about ‘moon gazing’. Not for him the spare imagery of the faux Chinese. Here, too, we see the interest in the illusion that is the phenomenal world, the way objective changes in light become wholly subjective changes in perception. For instance, a moon seen over Kangaroo Valley

… came up over the river, flickering, spreading its quiet. This moon had the crackle of unfathomed summer dark, casting black-white geometries on turpentines: its milky flowers were pathways over slopes, opening new ledges of light and shade, building them from saw-tooth shadows thrown by bottlebrushes. This full moon brought with stillness soft as a glove, finer than any wind could breathe through empty dark.

One feels here that Harrison has found a way to spin the lyric’s momentariness forever. One could almost read in both directions, so still does the poem seem.

But as with ‘A Month in the Country’, the meditations on place lead to elegiac matters. The stillness – as this is a poem concerned with mourning – must go. And so it does, with the older poet’s advice: ‘A poet never stays still, never stays in one place, you said’. Place and voice are, Harrison admits explicitly, interwoven. The poem ends with this thought developed into a synaesthesia of the landscape, so that the cicadas’ noise becomes a sort of speechless voice and looking at the moon the poet hears it ‘singing you, source of late sea-light, four years gone’.

Poets who choose eccentric voices (or are chosen by them) can prove frustrating to critics, since so often the sources of their defects and strengths seem indistinguishable. Certainly, for me, this is the case with Harrison. The strange syntax, the meandering nature of his poems, and so forth, seem to be equally present in the poems that work and those that don’t. Maybe that’s what he means about the platypus. Harrison has become a platypus of a poet and he is worth following, wherever he goes.