These collections from local poets will make you feel everything from warmth to rage

The banalities of parenting, a reckoning of global imperial capitalism and the detritus of inner-city life are just some of the subjects explored in recent collections by Australian poets.

Two Hundred Million Musketeers
Ender Başkan
Giramondo, $27

Two Hundred Million Musketeers, a debut book, starts off exploring parenthood, being in service to small bodies and loud entreaties. As Ender Başkan says in the first poem, “549am/i am dad/im on demand.” The title itself of this opening salvo is undoubtedly a common refrain for many parents: “Here Is the Shirt, (Get) Off My Back/Swimming in the Afternoon”. Indeed, some of the poems that follow suit survey a domestic domain that will be familiar to those who’ve ever had to pack Band-Aids and liquid paracetamol on a day out with little ones. From fronting up on a Saturday morning for sports to playing dress-ups, Başkan is there bleary-eyed, documenting the world of his two young children (“daaad”), where sometimes it feels like going to work means having a rest.

Stylistically, he favours an extended stream-of consciousness affair, sans punctuation and capitalisation (who has the time for that when you have to wipe runny noses?). His poems are relatable at one level and sometimes surreal and tangential as Başkan wanders into the past. There are also incursions into his Turkish ancestry and his parents and grandparents’ diasporic lives as well as worries about how to be true to your art while eking out a living.

Two Hundred Million Musketeers can frustrate the reader who wants narrative succinctness; its individual offerings are often long and meandering. Başkan may start off with a topic then dovetail into something completely different. However, there’s a certain charm in his freewheeling, playful, impressionistic voice.

The Rot
Evelyn Araluen
UQP, $24.99

With a title like The Rot, you already know Evelyn Araluen’s latest poetry collection will not be a fragrant, cheery affair.

The follow-up to Araluen’s critically acclaimed Dropbear (a bestseller in a tough market where poetry barely sells) is once again a mix of poetic prose. It’s still vehement and pretty grim: a reckoning of global imperial capitalism, weapons manufacturing, Gaza, and settler-colonialism among other things.

Research, critique and commentary are braided in this intertextual book, with an outpouring of grief and rage about the contemporary world as we know and witness it.

The Rot is riddled with feelings of unease and malaise: “There is light but/ no breeze, there is night but no sleep…”.

There are many poems written in the second person (“You”) as though Araluen is directly addressing the reader, pulling them into her work and requesting solidarity as she declaims, “Like you I have/fought not to lose myself in complacency.” Some pieces may be difficult to parse, with its literary and academic tone and references. Certainly, there’s a restlessness and resentfulness in this collection, with fragmented entries that read like an insomniacal Araluen was ruminating on various matters and working out her responses in a pique of frustration. Later in the book, the “You” is self-directed; the poet is looking inwards for possible answers.

The Rot is not one of those poetry books you can skip through; it demands concentration, both on a line by line basis and on a larger, more conceptual basis.

Doghouse
Holly Friedlander Liddicoat
Vagabond Press, $25

Poet and performer Holly Friedlander Liddicoat’s new collection, Doghouse, is lighter in tone. It’s poetry from the perspective of a 20-something based in Sydney: not about the sleek touristy capital city “that’s always flaunting its Whiteley blue” but a more down-at-heel, dog excrement on the pavement version. Friedlander Liddicoat ignores the vast billion-dollar harbour views and concentrates instead on the grungy backstreets aspect of share houses and close urban living.

Erratic and experimental, Doghouse is full of detail about the busyness and detritus of inner-city life. It’s riddled with small details such as lying around with cinnamon donut crumbs in a bed otherwise strewn with books, being woken up by people rummaging in bins for bottles for the 10 cent refund, and gift-picking flowers from your neighbour’s garden.

Here the narrator is vaping candy-flavoured fuzz while driving, trying to write and publish poetry, and dating a barista (“the sexiest thing/is your long fingers round the milk jug”). All while aiming to reach the optimum point between “Stress & the Good Life”.

In Doghouse, you’re likely to wander into a room where “crevices spew German cockroaches like confetti from a piñata”. There’s certainly no glamour here, but a heightened sense of the messiness of life that’s no less endearing. It’s the little things that give the book its sense of purpose and even beauty: a slushy left in an outdoor carpark, coconut oil used as lubricant, blackout blinds drawn at midday, a guava Cruiser sunset.

Too Much Night
Laurence Levy-Atkinson
Vagabond Press, $25

Melbourne poet Laurence Levy-Atkinson’s debut collection, Too Much Night, is grounded by the author’s long-term undiagnosed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Levy-Atkinson’s collection tracks him eventually acknowledging and then coming to terms with his condition: “There are the usual tricks to take,/Deep breathing and focusing on an object … But none of that matters when the day comes/And you can no longer breathe in lifts/Or wash your hands to anything less than bleeding.” There’s the compulsion for counting (“each stroke of a brush, /Each shake of the milk carton”), and for doing everything in even numbers to keep you safe (“Logic says you’ll be fine but intuition disagrees”).

However, Too Much Light is not just about grappling with a mental illness; its lyrical, sensitively written poems are for anyone who’s ever thought the world can be too much: too loud, intrusive and demanding (“I can’t turn the world off/Like a light, on the way out”). It’s a book for those who get lonely, and conversely at the same time, for those for whom it can be a struggle to leave home and socialise.

With a forensic eye, Levy-Atkinson documents his various symptoms, but he also finds solace in the natural world; interactions with the environment seems to soothe his obsessiveness and take him out of his headspace. Too Much Night is full of descriptions of seasonal changes, of being immersed in all manner of sounds and textures: mango trees, wild mushrooms, rock faces, driftwood and birds of spring. There’s both light and dark in this collection; the mix is just right.

The Drop Off
David Stavanger
Upswell, $24.99

Queenslander David Stavanger’s third collection is about the complexities of modern life, in which some of its anxieties are defused by humour and self deprecation. He writes wryly about divorce in Joint Statement as though he and the ex were movie stars giving a press conference, “we have mutually resolved to end this transaction amicably”. The title poem itself is about the prolonged fallout from separation and the logistics of co-parenting (“you are smaller than a nuclear family”).

Trying to negotiate part-time care for a full-time love (as well as child support and custody) is written in a spare but emotionally devastating manner, but then there’s Stavanger’s take on the housing crisis, real estate agents and landlords, which is more acerbic in tone. “… people like them//will always take the last beer//from your fridge”.

Broken families aside, there are also poems about the health of the planet and one’s own mental and physical weather (climate change, ageing, medical and psychology appointments).

The Drop Off is dedicated to Stavanger’s son, and many offerings directly address his child, whom the reader sees (non-chronologically) at different ages, from baby to adulthood. In one long prose poem, they collaborate on the shared experience of being bullied a generation apart. This intimate piece opens them both to vulnerability that’s bruising to read.

The domestic marries with an ironic turn of phrase in this book; Stavanger speaks from inside his experience, and sometimes the hurt is mitigated by years of reflection, other times it’s still raw and incohate.

Thuy On’s latest poetry collection is The Essence (UWAP).

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.