Further eeriness at the heart of the poem is accentuated by the poems near it: preceding poems feel personal, trauma delicately hinted at with writing that modulates subtle feeling. The following poem, ‘Dear Citizen X’, describes ‘the stupor of our polity’ against which people sew their lips. Elvey concentrates on the vocabulary of the polity to write on this topic newly.

This generous book – all carefully choreographed economy – utilises a range of modernist and post-modernist devices over several themes, including the body writing under the ephemeral influence of a ‘gust’ (one of Elvey’s favourite words), and a mode of unsettlement via sensitive ecological curiosity.

The prose poem ‘Each Cell Cultivates its Neighbours’ contains the line ‘All summer the soil was tight.’ I noticed this word because I’d scribbled ‘tight’ at the end of the previous poem ‘Body as Tree’, which contains seven taut couplets:

new knife a scald
witness disintegration

as focus blurs around
careers like banksia with

every cone worked for
each resolve sprung

Such lovely disquiet in the enjambment of ‘careers’ following the earthy theme and the pop of ‘sprung’ like fruit picked or a plant ripped from the soil. Later, I scribbled another note in the margin that went ‘all the while the climate apocalypse whispers’. I wondered if I’d overshot the point there, but towards the end of the book, as if to both clarify and express it more originally, Elvey, gently modulating pace in tiny couplets, writes: ‘apocalypse // arrives in desiccations’.

Besides also noting the collection’s radical theological reckoning in the twenty-first century, I want to mention a revelatory poem, ‘Briefly Suddenly’, made using found adverbs, in memory of the late Martin Harrison. It immediately brings to mind his melodic humanitarian voicings: ‘Usually mostly perfectly / occasionally consciously // nearly daily // only only // entirely entirely’.

Astroturfing for Spring by D.J. Huppatz

Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 97 pp

Idiosyncratic (to say the least) French poet, novelist, and playwright Raymond Roussel famously penned a late-career big reveal regarding his strange labyrinthine method (because at that point, no one other than a few passionate Surrealists had been particularly interested in unpicking his elaborate puns and structures). Astroturfing for Spring, the second poetry collection by Melbourne-based D.J. Huppatz, gleefully plays off Roussel’s book in an ironic ‘Afterword’ called ‘How I Came to Write Certain of These Verses’. Huppatz immediately diverts: ‘why is easier to explain’. The cheeky two-and-a-half-page treatise continues with ‘I wanted to … win prize money and receive fan mail’ and proceeds with lines such as ‘losing Pluto was a personal blow’, ‘The world of data harvesting is abounding in ampersands. No word is firm’, ‘Many Australian poets are fond of changing into their superhero costumes in a telephone box’, and signs off ‘That’s why I became a DJ.’

It’s all very ‘lol so true and haha’ (from the poem ‘What’s Nature Complaining About This Time?’), but this afterword reveals one of the book’s preoccupations: Australian literary culture’s significance in the face of an audience increasingly stuck in superficial screen- and data-driven cul de sacs. After all, the superhero poets ‘all try to jam into a single box.’

Huppatz jams (or spins or scratches) the lexicon into triplets and quatrains or mostly quite carefully designed free-verse poems. Castlemaine-based poet Kent MacCarter’s Sputnik’s Cousin is a relative of this type of linguistic pop-cultural hijinks. The word ‘data’ is Huppatz’s central, if not slightly overused, pivot. Another key source for Huppatz’s vocab, along with what he terms ‘The Digital Vernacular’, is ‘celestial navigation’. The scales and aesthetic of bits, pixels, and stars overlap:

A deadpool of chocolate fudge edges
submerged in galaxy hops the down-
ward motion sponging out light: you
are unable to unsubscribe at this time.

Ubiquitous banalities such as the word ‘unsubscribe’ appear new in this glittery context, and there are some clever line-break puns in there, too. Huppatz often follows these syntactically alert sequences with a straight-faced (well, smirking) address to the reader. ‘Do I need to repeat any of this?’ he asks in the opening poem ‘Excess Keratin’, after a mashed-up sequence, followed by ‘Seriously?’ or in a later poem: ‘Scroll down, you deserve it.’ These interludes offer a counterbalance to the density. I anticipated them. I think that’s why the ‘Afterword’ was particularly thrilling. It had me feeling there are still unexplored avenues for Huppatz’s poetry.

Ultimately, in Astroturfing for Spring, language is stretched and renewed. In fact, in the poem ‘Your Zoloft is Making Me Soft’, literature is used as a verb or is ‘slippery as verbs in compression pants’. Australian culture is literatured and scrambled and cannibalised – flamingos, uggs, data, champagne, and various forms of lawn return and return. A poem is titled ‘Why Won’t This Anthology Overflow’. This is a poetics of the brink; packed, jumpy language mimics our distracted, saturated attention.

Slow Walk Home by Young Dawkins

Red Squirrel Press, $19.99 pb, 78 pp

Slow Walk Home, by American-born Hobart-based slam poet Young Dawkins, opens with a Bob Dylan lyric from ‘Tangled Up in Blue’. Like this and even the best song lyrics, the poems are often flat on the page. In ‘Jennifer and Lenny’ (presumably Warnes and Cohen), the troubadours enact ‘the eternal dance’. The following soapish vagaries conclude the poem:

How does love ever
find a way?
It does, though,
and it does and will
always now and as then,
with hearts that pound
and touches that tremble
and kisses that promise
salvation.

A quick trip to YouTube shows what an adept performer Dawkins is. But without a theatrical counterpoint or the ephemera of performance, the poem’s imitative expression is clear. Early Leonard Cohen poems are written in a different register from his songs in order to exploit the specific generosity of the page – space for readerly curiosity. Many of the poems in Slow Walk Home are anxious for resolution at the expense of resonance.

When Dawkins turns to the natural world in the poem ‘The Sporting Life’, there are snatches of nifty lyricism: ‘down along creek beds / under the alders, / invisible sage and dust. / But I see a grouse strut / behind a stonewall.’ Still, this more interesting pulse is muted by the poem’s plodding last line: ‘We reel back late / to our bags on the bank, cowboys, Billy says, in a row.’

‘What I Know About Women So Far’ leans on Charles Bukowski in the hope of papering over its excess. Regarding a ‘long blond librarian’, the poet writes: ‘I try to explain the wind – how it moves through your hair’, and further, ‘I have been crazy / and crushed / and cried’, but, ultimately, the last five-line stanza begins, ‘But she is in the kitchen now, / happy with her new oil / and olives and cheese.’ Surely Dawkins knows the implications of ‘in the kitchen’ in 2021? In contrast to the contemporary vitality of Obligations of Voice and Astroturfing for Spring, which renew the witty poetics of the New York School, for example, the poems in Slow Walk Home often make The Beats seem antiquated.

Slow Walk Home works best as a tome to performative energy, such as a homage to Allen Ginsberg called ‘The Real Lion – Ginsberg’, which contains the jaunty lines: ‘such a luscious cocktail / on your early ride / up up up / the best rush ever.’