Duggan’s several spready poems (Under the Weather, Wild & Woolley, $3.95 pb, 64 pp) hold one style throughout, and for those who find notes more evocative than writing,  his book makes an easy tiny read. You pass names of towns and streets, the mandatory reference to Kerouac, italics once (too much food) and even concrete – a slightly ascending line of type reads: a town on a ridge. Now and then you’re told something as unspectacularly unfair as

     country towns degenerate
at the edges
          or you’re asked Broughton Head
          can’t be its real name?
                or perhaps?

and there’s a sort of haiku on page 29. Mostly, Duggan trails after gestures and incidents of attenuated living here and there with Steve, Bobby, and so forth. Playing with letters still, but as though scared stiff, Duggan has nothing new to say here about ‘ar-teests poets’ or anything else.

Vicki Viidikas in every poem (Knabel, Wild & Woolley, $3.95 pb, 62 pp) seeks the high or vital point of experience. ‘I have exposed a nerve, the very pulse spot of existence’ (‘Knives’) and I’ll talk less/and reach out, something will become clear …. the first cry for reality/will escape from these lips … (‘Parasols’) approach a re-statement of her poetic. The fact that no poem repeats another, in this book of many beautiful and distinctive and some tantalising poems, highlights her urgent way with language and her lack of smugness. In all ways it’s a travelling book. Viidikas is worth sending places, India and elsewhere, her meetings are richly atmospheric and are honest attempts to live with and grapple with human facts. Reading her after Duggan, I’m tempted to say a talent for living is the vital qualification of the poet; but that is to brush by without noting that Viidikas’s writing shows the more specific qualities at work.

The feeling of striving which fuels many of Viidikas’ most rewarding poems is foreign to Eric Beach (A Photo of Some People in a Football Stadium, Overland, $3 pb, 56pp). He has a hypnotic talent for the line or remark that sounds like revelation, as ‘milton wrote a blank cheque / for the unemployed’. He gets to it by a high-wire act, but there is no deception; the best poems are skilled balancing work. Even the slighter ones repay a feeling for how they read aloud; Beach has a fetching way with sound and phrase.

If you’re looking for doctrine, most of it is the poet-personality, taking experience with vulnerability and leaving it wry but foot­loose. Good poems that more openly make a political point are the title poem, ‘asylum’, and ‘we do/they are’.

It’s a pity that Lee Cataldi’s book (Invitation to a Marxist Lesbian Party, Wild & Woolley, $4.95 pb, 120 pp) both have print small enough to test the eyesight. Cataldi shows it’s exciting to be a Marxist lesbian, or at any rate to be Lee Cataldi. Her generously big first book takes me two ways: it recalls Beach in a facility with the effective upbeat ending; on the other hand, words become almost over-available, with pop easiness to a lot of it.

But it’s direct, readable and likeable. She has some pretty points, notably in her modernised ‘Fairy Tales’. She writes with feeling copiousness about love. There’s deadwood; ‘The Poem in the Classroom’ is pretentious and tedious, the point it makes is all over the book. But even at ambitious length, ‘At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners’ lurches with some flair through sections of verse and prose. As a statement of complex human dichotomy, related to the old pairing of blind man and cripple, it is convincing.