Other moments employ natural imagery to great effect: ‘The fire in your head / leaps ahead of you / and is soon / fire after fire / along the midnight road.’

What is perhaps most notable about Boyle’s project is the extraordinary way in which it brings together poetic invention (one is inclined to say ‘play’) with a profoundly elegiac mood. This is seen in Boyle’s use of puns, riddling, and rhetorical techniques such as anaphora. Boyle’s evocation of the repetition in the Hebrew Prayer for New Year and the Day of Atonement is an especially powerful example of the last of these poetic strategies. Boyle, a noted translator, is also interested in multilingual puns and the homophones that can be found in other languages (such as l’amour and la mort in French). In this respect, Boyle works with both the inherent doubleness of things, and also with the limits of language as a proxy for the limits of our being. Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness is a work of immense power. It does nothing less than find new ways to express the deepest challenges and mysteries of human existence.

The Lowlands of Moyne by Brendan Ryan

Walleah Press, $20 pb, 68 pp

As the title of Brendan Ryan’s latest collection suggests, The Lowlands of Moyne occupies a more recognisably material milieu than Boyle’s book. Nevertheless, Ryan’s evocations of the Australian pastoral are often elegiac and traumatic. As in Ryan’s other collections, the evocation of the rural is not simply an occasion for complaint and critique. Ryan knows this pastoral milieu from within; indeed, the tension between intimacy and distance is a recurring feature of his poems. Not surprisingly, perhaps, this tension is most clearly played out in the familial setting. Ryan, who grew up on a Victorian dairy farm, addresses this theme most explicitly in ‘A Father’s Silences’, in which the eponymous silences are ‘paddocks that hadn’t been ploughed before / paddocks it’s taken me years to relax in / paddocks I’ve kept returning to again and again’.

As ‘She Was a Mugavin’ shows, Ryan has an insider’s ear for the language and storying of the world to which he keeps imaginatively returning, though such evocations are balanced by graphic descriptions of the violence of farm life, as seen in ‘Dehorning’. The collection’s numerous ‘road’ poems represent the act of driving as a way of moving both through space and memory, producing a double vision in which the bucolic scene is brought into being even as its loss is experienced. As ‘Driving to Debating’ – with its references to George Pell – also shows, the poetry-inducing act of driving does not solely engage Ryan’s counter-pastoral poetics. The Lowlands of Moyne includes a number of more explicitly political meditations on contemporary life, while poems such as ‘Incident on South Valley Road’ show that shocking events can also be found on suburban roads. As this poem illustrates, The Lowlands of Moyne is an important addition to Ryan’s remarkable growing body of work.

Carte Blanche by Thom Sullivan

Vagabond Press, $25 pb, 70 pp

Carte Blanche – Thom Sullivan’s full-length début – also occupies the Australian pastoral domain. Sullivan neither glamorises nor sentimentalises bucolic locales but invests them with his own form of imagistic force. As seen in the opening poem, ‘Threshold’, the paddocks of Carte Blanche exist as enigmatic, liminal spaces that are both cultural and natural, ordinary and epic, graced by wind and a ‘fine grain of stars’.

The imagistic power of Carte Blanche is matched by an intense linguistic playfulness, as seen in the opening lines of ‘Kangaroos’ – ‘Grazing kangaroos / undo the hem of our bottom paddock’ – and the opening lines of ‘Hay Cutting’: ‘Brown hills shave back to corduroy / in the final hour of light’. Given Sullivan’s imagistic skill, it is no surprise that he is the master of the miniature, as seen in ‘Lamb Chops’ (quoted here in full): ‘Two chops in a pan: / an unnerving yin and yang – / wizened, almost foetal.’ This poem is not explicitly political, but the delight produced by the pan/an/yin/yang vowel music is undermined by the ‘unnerving’ imagery of the final line, a reminder that those of us who eat lamb eat baby animals.

While Sullivan attends to the moodful effects of visual imagery, a number of his poems are intense studies in the sonic possibilities of language. ‘Eden En Effet’ (French for ‘Eden in Effect’) cannily plays with the Edenic myth via classical pastoral tropes in the form of a lipogram that uses only one vowel: e. The poem is a tremendous mix of sound poem, conceptual writing, and literary revisionism. Such playfulness is also seen in ‘Plain Loco’, the first draft of which (the poet tells us) was produced ‘by populating an online poetry generator with cowboy clichés’. But this is not proceduralism for its own sake; the poem is utterly captivating.

Thom Sullivan’s range can be seen in ‘Memorial: Great Ocean Road, 2004’, a sequence that shows his skill in balancing euphony with narrative impetus. Sound and sight come together in a road trip that is part personal account and part regional history. In earlier decades, the poetic evocation of rural Australia was, for some, almost in itself aesthetically and politically suspect. Sullivan shows how far we have come from this simplistic attitude. Like his South Australian colleague, Aidan Coleman, Sullivan cannot be easily pigeonholed. Carte Blanche is an arresting calling-card, and – for me – it is one of this year’s most exciting poetic débuts.