All of Western Australia’s dense, conflicted history and present are packed into the train with him. The past may be another country, and Western Australia seems to want to be, to the studied indifference of the rest of us. Cramming these two propositions together in an air-conditioned tin can rattling through a landscape that is both empty and teeming with unspoken history can make the hair on your neck stand up, but it can also be great fun:

We totter from our snorting hellride.
Pretty quiet on a school day,
skate park, Christian bookshop at the strip.

My lone souvenir is Bad Girls of the Bible
and What We Can Learn from Them
in staunch softcover.

When the poet finally gets off the train in Sydney, to be met by his oldest mate, there’s a release, an almost joyous regard of not knowing anything about where he now is, that’s quite lovely. The middle section of the book, ‘Eastern States’, shows us Davidson at play, wide-rangingly, in a place where it is up to him to provide the atmosphere. It’s surprisingly tentative at times, though with ‘At the Non-Existent Statue of a Speared Arthur Phillip’ he seems to arrive definitively.

Then in the final section of the book, ‘Cottesloe Nights’, he is back ‘home’ again, and the night is dense, dank, but full of sparks and splutters of history, strange creatures. Sometimes it feels somewhat strained, but the gravitational pull is so great one almost wonders how he escaped it in the first place. It is half Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, half the Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’, but always very much itself.

 Chasing Marie Antoinette All Over Paris by Adrienne Eberhard

Black Pepper Publishing, $24 pb, 110 pp

Adrienne Eberhard’s Tasmania in Chasing Marie Antoinette All Over Paris has an altogether different feel. In a sequence of poems about different plants, there is a delicate but unshakeable balance between ‘seeing’ the plant as it is and splicing into its DNA all the things it conjures up from wider knowledge, cultural, geographic, and historical. In ‘Silver Tussockgrass’: ‘You are the green / of oxidised copper / heraldry is your instinct, / your feather tops / fanning like pennants, flags.’ In ‘Spreading Rope-Rush’, the words spread across the page and the consonants alliterate in waves: but it is in no way a contrivance. Eberhard follows this up with a compressed, coiled poem about the same plant, which releases in turn into ‘Truth’: ‘look closely now / can you see me? / the heart of me / the way I am grass / but space and time too / constellations / and specks of mud’. We seem to have moved up a notch in creation, or have we? The question hangs, and the poem sequence floats in space, both in and out of nature.

After this, the poems that follow, about people in cultural and familial milieux, are more stolid. A family Christmas in Paris, a visit to a museum: the feeling for the past, the present tenderness, are all there, but effortfully. Right in the middle is the poem the book is named for, and which the cover design portrays: ‘Chasing Marie Antoinette All Over Paris’. Why is this so? Granted, the sans-culottes view of history has increasingly given way to a less vengeful one, so it isn’t surprising that Eberhard has great sympathy for the doomed queen, as woman and as loving mother. Even so, she doesn’t really do anything to convince us that Marie deserves our pity, or to, as it were, check her privilege.

But then Eberhard turns things around again with a sequence based on a series of photographs of her grandfather and grandmother, taken in Java during the 1930s and 1940s. Interrogating the images, adding silent, invisible context, manoeuvring around colonial ambiguity, language slippage, exile, she sees her forebears as clearly as she sees the plants around her. The photos project themselves onto the poems after them, that move on in time but not in feeling, so that the book declines, in the best sense, into an exhalation of everything that has interested it.

Entries by Prithvi Varatharajan 

Cordite Books, $20 pb, 80 pp

Entries, the first book from Prithvi Varatharajan, almost dares you to make an idiot of yourself and say that it ‘defies easy description’. The author does describe it, but only up to a point. There are poems, to be sure, but there are many more prose pieces, which he wrote to himself as emails, also addressing ‘a changing group of people as BCC recipients’. They are vanishingly slight, but they don’t vanish. It feels like alchemy. Friends, places, ideas, hold together across decades, and he is playfully formal about that in ‘City Selves’, comparing Adelaide, where he grew up, and Melbourne, which he inhabits:

Adelaide: I go to the two houses I know besides my parents’, where I still have close friends, and sit at a dining table or on a sofa and talk.

Melbourne: I sit in bars and restaurants and talk. The bars are often the same while the restaurants are often different. I go to one house often and sit on a sofa and talk.

He is not quite detached, not quite attached; and he knows it. He has the double ambivalence of the exile from culture and family: ‘How absurd it is to end up on the other side of the world from people who are supposed to look after you, when you’re unable, or unwilling, to talk to them.’

Varatharajan has produced many audio programs on literary themes, and this book is essentially a soundscape for the logocentric. The poems are the quiet passages, waiting, marking time. He travels – to Europe, ‘home’ to India, and alertly all over Melbourne and its suburbs – and brings home conversations, dilemmas, snatches of culture. He will consider quite gravely (insofar as he can be grave) what it means to be in the margins, or what to make of his Tamil identity. But then he goes to a party, has intense conversations about academia, and ‘[leaves] the party with two writers who are also cycling; our conversation is light. We cycle in single file, and I talk to them over my shoulder about an arts festival that’s on the next day. I peel off as I approach the turn-off to my house, and they carry on down the road.’

The book is full of such grace notes: it is both a rare and an everyday luxury.