The poems divide into three sections: poems of creation or Genesis – in which poet and photographer attempt to stagger us with the immensity and diversity of life forms on the Reef; poems about birdlife; and poems about the underwater world. The human is the intruder, avoided by the oyster catchers and sea eagles; rejected by the sea-birds in ‘Night Scene’, spurned by the spirobranches in ‘Diver’, admonished by the source of it all in ‘Earth’. Photographically this is rendered by the final shot in which intrusive human footprints in the sand are juxtaposed with the dainty passage of a gull at the tide-line. Human existence seems lumpy and onerous when contrasted with the freedom of a pair of terns:

Their love is everything for which we have only metaphors …
If our love, that moves in its thick colloidal flow
troubling the veins of the heavy mammalian body,
had only wing for such free act and exercise …

Moreover, human existence becomes irrelevant in the geologic time through which the reefs and coral atolls form themselves. This diminishing of humanity is reflected in the visuals. Only four of the photos include people. Two of these are silhouettes, one is the back view of a boy fishing and the remaining one is of a fully-geared scuba diver on a graceful descent. None of the subjects is individuated; we do not see a single human face.

But having said that, one must recognize that in various ways the celebration of ‘pure nature’ does become an appropriative act, at least in the poems (and perhaps photography is inevitably that, anyway). For all their clumsiness, humans can exploit technology to soar (here underwater) and thus invade the domain:

What a wonderful thing is a flipper!
…
For no price will a sports-store sell you
the wings of an albatross, packaged.

More importantly, they can mythologize, whether reworking old myths of creation and Eden (‘The Beginning’), or calling for new myths to enshrine the wonders of the marine world (‘Scared Cowries’). But the preponderant myth in these poems is that of the relationship, both cognitive and sexual, between the Superpoet and the Reef. Addressing such diversity of life forms involves both celebrating the fecundity and knowing the complexity of the ecosystems. As enthusiastic makar and namer the poet participates in the creation of the plethora of life and fertility.

‘Should I liken them to dryads or hamadryads? …
Or see them as their prey might …
Reeking with scales and fishy blood?’

God, the primal biologist, lays out the specifications for the Reef in ‘The Beginning’, but that God is a conceit of the poet who subsumes Him in wearing the same yellow flippers. The poet is metamorphosed also as ‘The Diver’. This is the book’s major attempt to take up a theme announced in ‘Man’ – the seductive attraction of a tropical island for humans ‘grasping deep for Our Peace’. In ‘The Diver’ it is sexual rather than philosophical release. Each plunge of the naked diver below the surface, ‘his sex trailing free in the warm saline’, is a penetrative stroke. The spirobranches mimic this when, sensing his shadow, they ensheath their tentacles. The quest of the diver however is the giant clams, with their ‘bright skirt cover[ing] delicate straining parts’. These are ‘the perfect ones’, not presumably because they are any more complex or efficient in the ecosystem, but because they offer a quintessential erotic metaphor, ‘naked gland without carrying legs or clutching arms, at peace in its pulsing fluid’. The poet/diver admires, loses sight of, becomes ‘forlorn’ at the loss of, regains, fondles, is entrapped by, and tears away from the clam, ‘trailing a bracelet of blood’ as a token of consummation.

The range of poems and positions in this volume is considerable. In ‘Strike’ the poet is transparent recorder of bird diving on fish. In ‘The Noddy Tern’ he is privileged adjudicator of bird behaviour. In ‘Rookery Island’ he is self-conscious verbal recorder of the natural world. In ‘Sacred egg-cowries’ he is the humanizer of the natural. In ‘Earth’ he, with the rest of the human race, is addressed by the natural world. But O’Connor’s Barrier Reef is ultimately a Romantic projection. Although the overt starting point of the volume is the human-less world of reef and evolving island, this world become tributary to his persona rather than his witness being tributary to them.

Coleman’s photographs are nicely balanced between the ‘gee whiz’ shots of coloured creatures, the frozen action of bird strike or bushfire, the subtler forms and silhouettes of bird flight or sand balls, and the lugubrious threats of shark or ray. They are mostly parallel adjuncts to the poems rather than glosses or interpretations; the reversed photograph of the scuba diver is actually antipathetic to the drift of the poem it illustrates. Although it smacks of the technique of I-love-you-in-the-sunset greeting cards, the pages where text is overprinted on a background of phot are among the most effective.