Zoetrope by M.T.C. Cronin, and Peter Minter’s Rhythm in a dorsal fin, both definitely belong in this second category, though they draw their energy from different sources. Minter’s favourite subject is the sea, which gives him ample scope to express his sense of the deep forces at work in his surroundings – so deep, so restless, that they often overwhelm the human figures he places there as witnesses. They also tend to overwhelm the poems, investing natural details with overpassionate attributions and leaving thick eddies of words in their wake – ‘coagulant’ is the term Minter himself uses to describe just this sort of effect. My feeling is that the poet ought to relax a bit more – words have their own force, which is diminished rather than enhanced by piling them on top of each other.

There is an early poem of M.T.C. Cronin which asserts (citing Kant) ‘we experience things/as designed| within the/wider context of things/which are not’. It is from this realm of the ‘not’ – or at least, of the unfamiliar and the exotic – that Cronin draws her energy, which zizzes and pops as it races across time and place, picking up curiosities from Egypt and India, Goethe and advertising, the eighteenth century and the ‘sea’s green night’. Dorothy Porter, in her blurb on the back, calls it a mercurial performance, and she would know. But I have to admit that I wasn’t really carried away by the rush. Instead (being sceptical) I wondered whether there wasn’t a kind of Australian poetry which had to be fast and exotic in order to absolve itself of other concerns – like the unremarkable nature of its own origins, or questions of technique.

This issue was raised for me again by Mark Reid’s collection Bitter Suite. As the title indicates Reid is adept at turning a phrase or framing an image. The latter, particularly, he presents with a cinematic clarity, though with some puzzlement as to the ends in view:

He hunches over the radio’s lit face,
one hand dangling off the wheel like a primate,
the other busy tuning; his eyes
are similarly divided between the road & this safe-cracker’s task.

A safe-cracking primate? It’s such a neat trick, perhaps you shouldn’t worry too much. But I was struck by the fact that the collection should have, as its centrepiece, a sequence of poems on the escape-artist Houdini, one of which contains the following admission:

Mine is an art of contrivance;
if there were secrets I would share them,
though technique may only disappoint.
Wouldn’t you rather a little wonder?
what curses less?
As I trawl myself back
across these apparent hermetics
is it insufficient to simply announce it?
One would have thought so, normally.

The remaining three books, by Karen Attard, Lisa Jacobson, and Sue Nicholls, show a greater dependence on plain statement than they do on pyrotechnics. This is not to say they are more conventional, though conventionality certainly comes into it. Jacobson’s poems to her parents and grandmother are particularly well-formed, not only in technical terms, but in their expressions of filial regard – yet in some ways they achieve this balance only by leaving to one side the more painful ties that bind the generations, and which might, in other contexts, lead to disputation. Interestingly, Jacobson accompanies her devotional poems with others which stress the persistence of anxiety, the unruly element in relationships, the odd, the bizarre, the ghostly – as with her celebration of the giraffe, ‘like some prehistoric creature/come up for air/ out of a dark/and distant dream’. Here too, there are close limits to decorum.

It is one of Karen Attard’s strengths that she is able to present the plain and ordinary in a way which brings out its emotional intensity, without making the expression of intensity an end in itself. I’m not sure what drove the poet to go caving, when she’s so conscious of wearing too many clothes and borrowed boots – but the effect is a sudden, and inexplicable, drop through reality:

The ladder feels less substantial than a stocking run,
mud-slick soles slip on thin rungs. I drop for an
instant/forever. Someone shouts FALLING! and the belay
rope snatches me up. Catch of the day. I sway in the
echoes, my head lolling back.

The ‘catch of the day’ is as odd a fish as the simian safe-cracker – but it has humour, and point. There is a similar effect when Attard portrays a broken love affair in terms of supermarket produce, then good laundry practice, before concluding ‘it was your turn-/stile heart that drove us apart’. In the sequence ‘Jannie’, she traces her heroine across three generations using nothing more remarkable than Brylcream and confetti, a life of work in a woollen mill and an old leather jacket, as her milestones. It requires a fair degree of skill to make the simple things work.

Sue Nicholls has this skill too. A poet who introduces herself as someone who ‘has burned all her rejection slips and is now writing in the beautiful Bellingen valley’. And then again, her publication details show her to be somewhat over thirty five, the age at which creative activity is now assumed to cease in this country. Still, experience does have a few compensations to offer, like assurance and control. Having crossed from one life into another, Nicholls knows the emptiness in between.

The missing woman is fluent in cups of tea
all day adjusting the equilibrium of her
eternal value system to the hole of her
life which she is about to lead tomorrow.

Illness and loss have sharpened her awareness of death. In a number of moving but understated lyrics in the first two sections of her book, she captures the sense of human vulnerability with great precision and honesty, opening large perspectives by dwelling on unprepossessing actions, like the driving of a car, or a confrontation with an emu.

A word finally for Ron Pretty, the begetter of the series and the publisher of Five Islands Press. A peerless compere, though an invisible one, he deserves a round of applause.