Over the past four years I've been working towards a manuscript based around landscape. To my surprise I've found the area curiously under‑explored in Australian poetry. First, there was the pioneer/progress hegemony ‑ men against the bush/sea. That changed, but as writers we were too busy being urban and hip, locked in our heads or obsessed with word tricks. There, that's my half‑arsed potted thesis. With this in mind, 1 approached Wynne's latest book with some enthusiasm.

At first his landscapes are true, uncluttered with identity, urban imagery & the drive to sense. He sees each element assertively as itself. Intruding power poles & cars are also just what they are:

... we retreat to the car and the rain battering on the roof. You don't know anything the rain says again and again.

(page 128)

Of course, the great regret of any "natural" landscape today is that man is as ubiquitous as the sky. Every setting is edged by this truth:

'Follow it downhill and you'll arrive somewhere. This is the idea of border.'

One may be puzzled for a while by the way Wynne eschews separating his landscapes geographically. We jump between Ireland, Australia and (1 think) the US with no easy guide. After the head scratch you get the point ‑ it's about earth & water.

This book talks about us too, & the author. The hand, so confident sketching the environment, initially seems to need the external to capture human events ‑ everything is viewed through a filter or via the medium of natural imagery ‑ see Raising UI453, Stones & Through a mask, darkly.

Frozen Rocks says that all:

'But there rocks are frozen now and that place where we were is underwater'

Here is the threat of landscape ‑ you go too far in and you'll lose the firm grip on the subject eternally interesting to many poets themselves! This distance is subsequently sloughed as the book progresses. Wynne, those he writes about and the reader are absolutely there in poems like Friction and Painting the Skeleton. Humanity and its world conjoined.

The book (nearly) ends with one of my favourite poems in the collection Bowed but not broken ‑ raw ‑ powerful.

This is a book rich in compassion, sky, water and the hush ... comfortable in each element, in love with it.

PS another great cover from the Roger Dean of Oz poetry, Bemard Sullivan.

Les Wicks