Given that Cadaver Dog reads as plot-driven narrative, it is worth considering the merits of its versification. Best has divided the book into nine-line stanzas; every third line comprises a single word or word fragment:

To offer something of my plight, without
the tedium, would be to say I’m alive. To offer
much
more would only serve the voyeur, the delighter …

Scan for the rhyme and controlled, ballading cadence, assets of the book at large. Another effect on the page is a spareness that, while pleasing to the eye, risks arbitrary enjambment: ‘doubles / back’; ‘breath in our / lungs’. At times, the formatting also operates in tension with the storytelling, which can lean on exposition: ‘At dawn, I searched the kitchen for a knife, / promised / to plunge it in my neck.’ On Lyn Hejinian’s spectrum between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ texts, Cadaver Dog sits nearer the ‘closed’ end, resulting in verse that favours tragedian pathos over suggestion and restraint. Whether such an approach is flaw or virtue depends on the tastes of the reader.

The manuscript of Cadaver Dog won the prestigious Thomas Shapcott Prize in 2019. It’s a timely rendering of an event the likes of which will inevitably occur with greater frequency and force. What feels like a missed opportunity, for me, is Best’s decision to cast ‘the surge’ as ‘a deranged / killer’ rather than as the feedback of a climate to which humans have laid waste. That nature acts with malevolence upon helpless subjects seems a fraught implication. The book’s epigraph is from Job, and the religious subtext throughout might have offered a platform for a more layered meditation on the Australian ethics of country.

Thorn by Todd Turner

Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 80 pp

A tercet from ‘The Ring’ in Todd Turner’s sophomore collection, Thorn, captures the book’s fundamental subject position: ‘When … / … you’re standing on the borderline / between what is given and what is gained’. This liminality haunts Turner’s poems of rural life and lyric attentiveness. A moving example is ‘Middle Name’, an eight-part narrative of family tragedy on a farm and the inability to respond in any way but silence: ‘Out there, what lingered unspoken was Word.’ A study of intergenerational trauma, it’s also an Ars Poetica: a discourse on articulating the ‘hidden transparencies’ the speaker mentions in ‘Heirloom’.

Thorn is in part a collection of odes. Most of its poems feature a central, triggering object: ‘The Raft’; ‘Magpies’; ‘Tent’. What keeps this strategy compelling across the book is how Turner varies the purpose these objects serve. Sometimes this is phenomenological, revelatory: in ‘Switch’, the speaker holds through a telephone switchboard’s ‘mill of transferring etcetera’ until, ‘almost at once … / the low level sound of my father’s breath’. At other times, Turner revels in observation, as in ‘Guinea Fowl’: ‘And they’re far too busy / to swan about in a peacock suit / with the air of a lark ascending.’

Turner is strongest in trim lines that let image and import resound. One of Thorn’s best poems opens: ‘At fifty my mother started to collect dolls’; compare that clarity with this from ‘Tiny Ruins’: ‘Dark air invisibly roped me with heavy knots.’ In my favourite ode, the speaker observes a horse at first light: ‘Blowing in from the tops, / the air shifts and stirs; long flanks of light / strip shadows from clay.’ Here, alliterative ‘l’ and ‘s’ patterns evoke the kinetic stillness of the scene. Elsewhere in the collection, phrasing can loosen, sometimes to pleonasm: ‘assorted / mixed bag’; ‘cartwheeling end over / end’; ‘spent and exhausted’. One driver of this unevenness, to be fair, is the range of Turner’s register. We expect cliché and slang from the child, or from the horseman, much as we expect ‘[n]uminous wellings’ from the poet.

Some Sketchy Notes on Matter by Angela Gardner

Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 76 pp)

Some Sketchy Notes on Matter, Angela Gardner’s tenth book (three as co-author), offers an acerbic, technically assured social and environmental commentary. The book’s six sections arc the reader from a Romantic exultance of nature through the ravages of colonialism, modernisation, globalisation, and climate change, back to a gaze that, no longer innocent, remains exultant: ‘The feijoa flowers as if to itself. All of this (it / seems to say). All of this.’

Such sweep demands a versatile poetics. In ‘I return to my body (I turn for home)’, free association voices the sensory overload of contemporary life: ‘Should we forgive large-scale participatory actions? / Use insects as robots to soften the peculiar physics / of downward acceleration and resistance? It’s not candy / -crush.’ Later, children play a board game of global conquest while the television beams the Moon landing: ‘what I remember was a bulky white / suited man climb down a ladder onto a grey powdery terra nullius …’  The poem’s title: ‘Early lessons in colonialism’.

At the end of this road, Some Sketchy Notes on Matter implies, waits disaster. In ‘Battlefield photograph’, the speaker asks us to ‘Imagine meeting under small flames, white-hot flowers in a mild / degraded sky.’ What an exquisite enjambment, a hinge that opens menace. Similarly, the speaker in ‘Crossing the line’ concedes: ‘I don’t understand the undifferentiated water …’ Like poets before her and to come, what Gardner critiques is how knowing requires division, which threatens to occlude bigger pictures: ‘And we’re only part way through / simulating our new reality. Not through the source code, / nor the updates. Not how it works: the plastic crap, / the whales, the carbon sink.’ In her afterword, Gardner writes that ‘poetry can change how we see the world and our place in it, encouraging us to be open and fearless and take responsibility for our actions.’ An ambitious, necessary remit.