These are lyrics of clarity and assurance, marked by a simplicity which is not naive, but genuinely reflective, plangently reflexive:

Myself caught sight of
bending over the pond.
So old a man already,
so sparse the white hairs …

(‘Poem in Chinese Ink’)

The purity of diction which they display keeps paradoxically insisting that purity of mimesis is not to be had. We are teasingly admonished in ‘Summer Brush-strokes’ to ‘Keep these melted shadows. / Keep this blue page, / summer seen, summer felt, not summer known’, while in another poem we encounter the perceptual strangeness of ‘My fingertips are calloused with much seeing.’ Perception turns out to be a dodgy business.

Morrison’s poems are poised, grave, stanzaic. He makes use of the heraldic power of bold primary colours. He is also, in a Fifties-ish manner, interested in extending a trope through a whole poem. Some of his effects are synaesthetic, as when a peacock’s cry ‘trails a shawl of jewels across our dream.’ The poetry, in a gentle way, keeps alluding to its bookishness, hinting, especially at Chinese or Japanese models; yet two of the loveliest poems here are concerned with a sense of Scotland from afar:

A rose becomes a stream and fills a waste,
an eagle soars through landscapes of a dream.
No longer are grey pearls the pearls they seem.
Fernless water has fernless water’s taste.

Here and there the traditional diction blurs but these are poems of craft and feeling. Among them I would single out for special praise ‘These Moments’, ‘Scotland’s Exiles’, ‘Nightbreak’, and ‘Returning’. The book should give continuing pleasure.

In Hal Colebatch we find a poet who has sturdy intentions to broaden the scope of the art, to push it out into wide fields of comment, politics, social satire, modern history. For my own taste, there are too many poems in Outer Charting about foreign travel. Also, there are problems of organisation, so that a swingeing attack on the World Council of Churches for its support of the Zimbabwe Patriotic Front is followed by two poems about Timor which are completely apolitical. This can leave a reader bewildered.

Colebatch writes mainly in that sturdy Anglo-Australian form, the quatrain. He frequently uses informative but rather unmusical pentameter line through which the ghost of a four-beat line makes itself heard. Something of an anti­modernist, he likes his poems to move to rounded conclusions, large socio-moral apothegms. Thus ‘Coastal Knot’, a sequence about the Batavia mutiny and the heroically loyal Webbye Hayes, finishes with the stoical couplet, ‘We have been lucky so far. Our lives on this coast/ have turned mostly upon small things.’ Another poem winds up with ‘one assumes the poets’ songs will be denied.’

From this gallimaufry of poetry there emerges a demeanour of the author as sociable, humorous (although not witty), resigned, masculine, politically conservative, and detached. His best poems are different from one another: the opening ‘Poem’ is a terse little fable about life as siege; ‘Saturday Afternoon at the Nedlands Hotel’ is short but jaggedly enjambed; ‘A Song of the Prague Spring’ is leisurely in a way its title would suggest; ‘Interesting Times’ and ‘Autumn Morning’ are the strong and cumulative images.

So much in Outer Charting is cumulative in one way or another. Maybe this is part of Colebatch’s populist stance. Nevertheless, I must admit to feeling that if the book had been edited to about two-thirds of its present length the best work would have shown out far more clearly.

When we turn to Andrew Sant’s The Flower Industry, we find poems which sound more Eightiesish than those of Morrison or Colebatch. His dispassionate ironies, his cool diction, his alternation of free verse with tercets or flattened couplets, all these have an astringent modern feel. He practises a poetic mode – the unbuttoned meditation on a set topic – which is remarkably common among Australian male poets. We can find versions of the mode in Murray, Porter, Steele, Malouf, O’Connor and, before them, in FitzGerald and Hope. Women practise it seldom, for reasons which I cannot untangle here: it would be worth exploring, though.

Interested in perception though he is, Sant’s bent is towards analysis and abstraction – abstraction from a base in daily experience. His sense of process is incapsulated in the opening lines of ‘Thick Glasses’:

When, for fun,
I try on those plastic-rimmed glasses
your collapse into laughter
is blurred out
of focus.

Blurring, abstraction, doubt, questions, these are the spurs to Sant’s intelligence. His verbs pay tribute to such enquiries; he leans to the formal, often Latinate verb with an inbuilt prefix: among them I noted perceive, review, compound, discard, collect, divert, translate, erect, rehearse, exclude, and escape. There are three in the last line of ‘Driving through Connemara’, where a car makes a beeline ‘as if surprised to discover itself exposed.’

The poems in The Flower Industry which strike me as liveliest and most finished are ‘A Fossil’, ‘Soundwaves’, and ‘Keeping in Touch’. The last of these is really splendid. He looks like a poet who will go on, and acquire more bounce.