The Amorous Cannibal is as fizzy a book of poems as you could ask to read. Language manages to play on its own, relying on the shapes of nature encoded in it, and at the same time the proverbial things the poet has to say (which is the main reason for his rounding up his words) lose none of their essential decorum. There is a definite key signature to this collection of new poems – it has a Schubertian major/minor ambiguity. Even the alarms and despairs of life have a place in the verbal landscape: the poet can make verse out of anything, including anti-poetic matter. The centre is green and precarious Melbourne, and the poetic map includes such sites as any reader would expect to find featured in his cultural Michelin – university campuses, seaside houses, suburban gardens, works of art via the record player and four-colour plate, typology of Body Watching including the Neighbourhood Watch, plus Doomsday on the Box, and on the poet’s pulse. Handling the urge to play Cassandra is one of the poet’s most delicate tasks today. Cavafy, Auden, Roy Fuller – how right did they get the parallels between our slippery decadence and that of our forerunners in the Seleucid Empire and the Roman? Certainly, not better than Wallace-Crabbe gets them in several poems in this book, most outstandingly in ‘The Fall of the West’. The plot is familiar – hairy men wonder at the detritus our age left behind: ‘Jig, barbarian, over these / machiolated ruins … / these bricky brac geometries / and bushland scene.’ What could be more representative of our civilisation than a place of liberal education?

           … a college –
a kind of, sort of barracks
plus public house where the gone pale folk
laid claim to worship knowledge.

Here the smaller animals scamper over the remains of utilitarian temples dedicated to ‘Boog who devised the manilla folder’, and ’Kogo, inventor of scissors’. Wallace-Crabbe is too wise to let the poem go out on a full doomy diapason: he, has more of the Cavafy tactfulness – the satirical picture fades to a vision of life restarting: ‘Look, in the shrubbery, that odd beast. / And what are these bright green birds?’

People ask what Doomwatch poems are for, misled I suspect by Wilfred Owen’s unconvincing words about a poet’s duty today being to warn. Mankind is unwarnable: a poem such as ‘The Fall of the West’ is about energy, about the mind’s ability to accommodate anything except extinction. In some ways, clever lyrics of this kind are the twentieth century’s substitutes for tragedy, which everybody, from Nietzsche onwards, agrees we are unfitted for. Macbeth is not about restoring good government to Scotland. Wallace-Crabbe’s poem is not about the end of the world, but might be about Melbourne University. In his two ‘Eating the Future’ poems, he even manages to make the Age of Anxiety a source of hilarity and confidence. Since he is kidding, he can include a little Martianism as well – ‘The city … is a flower, / the clouds are escapades of cottonwool which give aesthetic cuddles …’ But he knows ‘we hurt’, and that God will not help us make sense of things, except through his dispassionate rules. So, this poem ends on a statement which is a truism raised to sheer contentment: ‘The speed of light is constant everywhere.’

The Amorous Cannibal develops Wallace-Crabbe’s talent, for the extended discourse, the sort of poem which asks to be called an ode. He handles this relaxed structure, with its obligatory conversational tone and its easy habit of flaring into purple, more assuredly than anyone in Australia except Les Murray. One of the best examples here, ‘Sacred Ridges above Diamond Creek’, is dedicated to Murray, but also to the poet’s tape recorder. And what poet has not felt that he composes better when he argues with himself· half asleep than when he sits at his desk in livery? ‘Sacred Ridges’ is a bestiary, probably in answer to Murray’s aboriginalisms, and seems to me to be a sort of exorcism of nationalism:

…so I pay my spilt tribute to all those neglected totems,
to clever-tailed possum with his unspeakable voice,
to willy wagtail in flight, a whole symbolic system …
… to black bream and snake (the latter perhaps renamed after an Indian quadruped),
to kookaburra, raucous herald of fire’s daily return,
to the wildcat whom I do not know,
to the ‘furred and curious wombat’,
to you all, primal kin of the region I choose to live in …

The poem is also Smart-like, in that Natural History offers a doxology, even if Diamond Ridge is rather a different vantage point from Bedlam. Other large ode shapes are ‘Kia Ora’, ‘A Stone Age Decadent’, and ‘River’.

Wallace-Crabbe’s wit is often set in short poems, themselves gathered into clusters. He is fond of the sort of poem which was pioneered by the Greek Anthology, and his purpose in these is usually to make a connection or point to a facet. Such are ‘The Bits and Pieces’ and ‘Squibs in the Nick of Time’. His medium-length lyrics often exhibit considerable disquiet. Here his Presbyterian inheritance shows itself. Loss of faith does not lead to a diminution of portentousness, but it ensures that perception outranks prescription. ‘The Home Conveyancing Kit’ and ‘That Radical Politics Is Impossible’ are seismic readings of the ground under Australia’s miracle of calm and collected decency. The first begins as a warm satire on property-owning democrats, but, in the manner of an archaeological dig, opens up the strata of the homely plot, down to the most impersonal and undignified:

Under the lemon are the bones of somebody’s dog.

The second poem is the more original: it is extraordinarily difficult to ensure that wise saws and modern instances don’t end up sounding wind-baggy or even rat-baggy, but this time, the end is inevitable and not just sententious:

So belt up
or put up or shut up because
to him which hath some gravy
shall gravy be given forever.

A poem of a similar sort and probably the strongest poem in the book is ‘Panoptics’. History’s and prehistory’s long vistas are amusingly but sadly visited, and our many ancestors, most of whom were more poetical people than we are, are shown to have vanished in the face of ‘a new taxonomy/ (which) keeps all the stars in place’. The language in this poem is exquisitely tailored to the dying fall of the theme.

The Amorous Cannibal continues the worldly ascent of mysticism which Wallace-Crabbe began in The Emotions are Not Skilled Workers. Perhaps no single poem in the new book ‘is, as witty as ‘Pantuns’ in the former, but the overall humanity and hilarity are greater. Wallace-Crabbe is now in his high season as a writer.