Reminiscent of Oscar Schwartz’s often hilarious The Honeymoon Stage (2017), which recounted social media interactions and emphasised both lack of affect and passionately pursued crazes, the humour and intention in Driscoll’s work are more slippery. Although his writing displays this lack of demarcation between intellect and trivia, public and private, which modern communications encourage and many poets exploit, some of the best poems transcend that mire and concisely provoke a less ironised disturbance, such as ‘Unsettled and’:

Another time we entered the country
Had the effect of being ...
The years had the same
The effect of being cautioned.
In time, we grew accustomed
To the quiet and the generosity.
The walls were whitewashed
And we owned a cat.

Driscoll’s simple diaristic observations and interactions strain towards a cohesion that is always elusive, and remain both offhand and melancholy beneath the surface humour, ‘I wanted the crane to make a sound but it never did.’ This is a varied collection of shifting styles and often concise imagery, from the airport’s ‘terminus of thought’ (‘One of several attractions’) to the unexpected structuring in ‘Lines for a poem #7’, which piles up with fracturing, dream-like images using slightly changing or expanding lines: ‘when the snow came sheltering down; nothing so much as; not yet choked by the blistering; when at last; this is an hour; and this is an hour’.

nothing to declare by Mags Webster

Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 94 pp

In Mags Webster’s second book nothing to declare, many poems springboard from other poems, some thoughtfully refined, such as ‘Sinister’ (after Tracy Ryan), or ‘Inside the Ghost Mind’, which conjures Emily Dickinson: ‘Then her fingertips / brush past my brow, // and she slants her small / curved smile. I’m Nobody she / whispers – Who are You? ’ Other poems are unable to resist or respond to the original. These include ‘Mrs Batman M.D, Msc, Psych. D’, which, though inspired by Carol Ann Duffy, echoes Gwen Harwood’s tone. So many allusions to and echoes of other poets can be stifling and distracting rather than stimulating, but Webster mostly retains her own carefully descriptive style: ‘you lie coffined / sessile // in night-camouflage / you mimic / death’ (‘Sleeper’). Possibly influenced by Christina Rossetti’s ‘In An Artist’s Studio’, other poems reprise a feminist trope, such as ‘Bonnard beauty reveals all’:

I recede into
a wash of stipple and blur,
as if he’s swabbing all
the woman from the frame.
When I take the towel

from his outstretched hand,
it’s the only time his eyes
can meet mine.

An underlying theme is the Persephone myth of death and rebirth, which continues outside the specific poem ‘Digging up Persephone’. Interestingly, in contrast to Jo Pollitt, who sees poetry as an extension of her dance practice, Webster offers a profound distinction between mind and body, the Cartesian dualism illustrated in many poems, sometimes amusingly. The body in Webster’s poetry is both a site of complaint and of pleasure, perceived almost as a soporific appendage or millstone that is outside the self, the mind. This is perhaps more through the perception of others rather than any narrator, most obviously in ‘Autopsy’ and ‘Scan’, where medical science reduces the speaker to body parts, but also in ‘Eating together, eating alone’, which describes a bulimic person’s quarrel with herself: ‘The fridge / my altar.’

the dancer in your hands < > by Jo Politt

UWA Publishing, $22.99 pb, 128 pp

Jo Pollitt’s the dancer in your hands < > experiments with typography and design, mingling poetry and prose, and seeks to replicate movement. There is a breathlessness in her imitation of dance that graphically choreographs the explosions of migration, love, and sexuality.

This is a dancer hidden into writing, found, palm size, in your hands, folding, inside outing both pressed one third at a time comma time one third at once comma this is a dancer comma borrowing a qantas plane comma ... My teacher, the great ballerina Lucette Aldous, was clear about what it takes to stay on your legs; one to think, one to spin, one to think, one to spin ...

This book-length poem is generated by a percussive style that acknowledges its influences as Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein. One particularly Beckettian section echoes his ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ (‘Worstward Ho’): ‘Hide better // Bite harder / Hide better / Bite harder // Bite harder // Press harder / Bite better / Hide pressure.’

Pollitt’s style is determinedly mottled, as if tearing the long poem from any confinement, deploying concrete poetry, recorded speech, ellipses, narrative, lines representing a heart monitor, paragraphs composed of slashes, words clinging to the right margin, numbered lists. But an emphatic use of repetition, as in scoring a single word over several pages, can become an exhausted mannerism. At other times, Pollitt’s repetitions are apposite, an embodiment of feverish yet hollow cathexis, a Saint Vitus dance of obsession.

What if her hand tears down my typography what if it can’t be read what if the language is not my own what if the covers forget their contents what if it’s impossible to disappear, what if in years, after another war, someone in a gallery clicks the X to expand the letters arranged for your seeing, what if you don’t remember reading me what if your fingers find colour what if you become the writer

In attempting to twin dance with lyric, Pollitt’s writing circles in frenzy, a type of expansive onomatopoeia in which words parallel movement. But the theme of love’s encounter becomes over-extended, even monotonous, through gymnastic repetitions of language.