There are many excellent poems on perennial themes here. The familiarity of subject in no way detracts from the poems’s originality, even, strangely enough, when some of the phrasing verges on cliché.

There is also a sensible and sometimes hilarious commentary on sexual mores:

the men come in groups or pairs or
            just alone
to stare
as if something rare
like mushrooms that only grow
deep in the forest
or on this particular sunny patch of
            sand
and if they had baskets perhaps they’d
            gather us
and spill us out on the kitchen
            table …
yet I remind myself to be grateful
this bizarre human impulse
to stare at what is merely common
gives us asparagus

(‘Common Inedible Vegetables’)

Just over a hundred pages long Luxury could have been more rigorously edited to exclude occasional lapses like ‘The Bed’ which is essentially a high school essay on ‘my favourite possession’. The book is published by Redress Press, one of the growing number of small publishing companies serving special interests (in this case women’s writing) of work difficult to place in larger commercial publishing forms.

Llewellyn and Susan Hampton have edited an anthology of Australian poetry by women which it is expected will be published by Penguin sometime this year.

Katherine Gallagher’s Passengers to the City is very good when it speaks to maternal feelings, children, family and friends; it does this with considerable delicacy and originality.

One short section of the book is given over to commentary on Wimmera life and landscape:

craving for shape
an upright of the mind on dry
            horizontals …
where eye must learn to live
without sculpture
moulded out of earth’s surprises
where silo is focus
signposting functional
the town’s blank sentinel
on a railway thread

(‘Wimmera Windscreen’)

Her observations here are precise and wonderful, comparable to the Wimmera poems of Joyce Lee which provide the standard in this setting.

Gallagher’s powers of observation seem to fail her, though, when she ventures into French cathedrals or is standing in front of paintings. ‘Chartres Cathedral’ is a weak work of admiration, and ‘After Rembrandt’s “Abraham and Isaac’’ adds nothing either to the painting or the biblical story.

Best are the poems in which she looks to herself, to her family, or to events that have both personal and political significance. In these categories there are excellent and diverse poems: ‘Domestic’, ‘Role-Play’, ‘Woman in a Tableau’, ‘The Survivor’. She can write solemnly without being pretentious, and more lightly and humorously without becoming mundane.

As usual, the production values of this Hale & Iremonger book are excellent.

Vicki Raymond’s Holiday Girls and other poems is a relatively short but excellent first book; actually, it’s an excellent book regardless of being her first. Raymond switches easily between a lively and semantically interesting free-verse and more formal but still very subtle arrangements. The poetry is sometimes didactic in tone (‘Don’t Talk About Your Children’, ‘The Professions of Poets’) without being sermonish; a quality put to good effect in ‘Franklin River Poems’ where intelligent argument is supported by some striking imagery.

It’s unfortunate that writing of this standard does not more quickly gain acceptance by established publishing houses which could distribute it more widely. But Twelvetrees has done a very good job, despite the 10 point setting of the print.

Stephen Edgar’s Queuing for the Mudd Club is a workmanlike first volume, self-consciously stylistic, rigid even when attempting humour, and, most of all, prolix. His writing is somewhere between Roget’s Thesaurus and a fine arts department. There are several ‘travel’ poems which contain sentences like ‘Now a bus was our belated guide/Along suicidal roads,/ Accompanied by/Mesmeric undistinguishable music/And hooded crows;/And as we risked our way,/Between us the turning heads/Passed an uneasy avarice/And reserve.’ Eh? More art, fewer adjectives, please.

These four books were published with the assistance of the Literature Board of the Australia Council.

‘Luxury’
by Kate Llewellyn
Redress Press, $6.95 pb, 109pp

‘Passengers to the City’
by Katherine Gallagher
Hale & Iremonger, $8.95 pb, $16.95 hb, 80pp

‘Holiday Girls and Other Poems’
by Vicki Raymond
Twelvetrees Publishing, $9.95 pb, 43pp

‘Queuing for the Mudd Club’
by Stephen Edgar
Twelvetrees Publishing, $9.95 pb, 71pp