If poetry in its various forms can be seen as a gauge of human perception and preoccupation at a given time, the subjects in Animals with Human Voices cover much that is prevalent in the world today under the wider themes of human vulnerability and uncertainty: environmental degradation, climate change, materialism, extinction, the impact of human behaviour – on ourselves and on everything else. These are recurrent and resonant foci of the times in which we live and to which much contemporary poetry is responding, multifariously. O’Brien’s compelling lyric poems speak to public concerns and philosophical challenges in a way that makes the reader look inwards as well as outwards. It is not the case that the lyric by nature eschews social engagement. Critics such as Theodor Adorno and Jonathan Culler claim that public perception of lyric as the expression of individuated experience is a recent development. By contrast, they draw the tradition back to the ancient Greeks, when lyric spanned the private and the public. In O’Brien’s work, an energetic tension emerges between the two.

For a collection provoked and disturbed by the meanness of the world, and at times devoid of hope in its view of human troubles and the future, Animals with Human Voices contains plenty of humour – mostly ironic – and love. Humour within serious poetry is a feat I admire (John Tranter and John Forbes spring to mind). O’Brien’s humour is mostly nuanced and oblique. It can cosmological in scale: ‘It will keep surprising you, this universe, its infinite / humour’.

‘Dust’, a series of six meditations on entropy, is a twenty-first-century echo of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ from which its epigraph comes. Dust swirls through the pages of this remarkable poem, literally and symbolically: from the desertification of Libya viewed from space, to sloughed skin cells, or the soils of the Amazon rainforest leaching into the Pacific; from the detritus of offices and the shreds of workers’ contracts, to the dust blown by coal trucks and building sites, and to the accretions of the Anthropocene. The accumulative rhythms and sound patterns of O’Brien’s language here – redolent of Anglo-Saxon with its oral tradition of lists and alliteration, pace, and abundance of metaphor – get under the skin. Part four concludes singularly: ‘Nothing in the / long average of infinity can be done to clean the world.’

‘Measures of Truth’, another long poem, tackles its subject through five distinct narratives. It begins with the incontestable truth of the Earth’s history as revealed in Antarctic cores: ‘hairs of ice’ pulled out of ‘the thousand-year frozen pelt’. Part two looks at the truth that dementia reveals and hides; and part three reflects on what the web of a spider, high on cocaine, might reveal of truth, art, or genius. Part four begins: ‘A planet is the only test-tube that we possess, / large and wide enough and old enough / to encompass the truth.’

Recurrent interplay occurs between the cosmological and the minutiae of human activity. Such swings form a conceptual rhythm that brings together the diverse forms and subjects of the whole collection in a startling way. O’Brien trusts his reader to stay with him as he leaps, for example, in ‘Measures’ from the black hole at the centre of the galaxy, to Krushchev’s Cold War ban on rock and roll. The link is revealed through the metaphor of the title.

In the tradition of the many marvellous poems written about and from the point of view of animals, O’Brien’s are affecting and have a mood and character of their own, impelled as they are by twenty-first-century pressures and urgencies. The compelling opening monologue is from the point of view of an earthworm. Despite the somewhat twee title, ‘A Rainbow Made of Soil’, the speaker’s character and ontological position are instantly arresting: ‘If I am lost, I have been lost since I was born. / There are no gods for worms, we are each alone. / How would a god find me, scratching in the dark?’ This, and the following poems about Trilobites and spiders, introduce the reader to the context of long time and universals in which so many of the works in this book are embedded.

What is in a spider that it may link
invisible point to invisible point,
stretch inference over abyss, mark
casualties, connect nothing to nothing? …
…We’ll move along those lines
ourselves one day …

So much is quotable. In ‘Mangrove Canal Road’, the reader’s ear becomes trained to the quietening assonance of boat wrecks, subsiding into mud and silt, whose ‘hearings’ are ‘constantly deferred’ by ‘the slow courts of the ocean’. In ‘Atlas Carried the World’ the fireman Stanislav – read all firemen and women – ‘rescue[s] the future from the burning past’.

Here and there, lines are overladen and in the odd poem proselytism outweighs the humour, as in ‘A Survey of Australia’s Religions’. In contrast, the tightness of ’The Prayer of Small Men’ creates more biting social satire. I am not sure why explanatory Notes were thought necessary to accompany the poems. But these are minor reservations about a collection that will reward many readings.