Five collections

Reviewed Peter Porter, Chorale at the Crossing, Picador, 57 pp.; Peter Boyle, Ghostspeaking, Vagabond Press, 370 pp.; Bonny Cassidy and Jessica L. Wilkinson (eds), Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry, Hunter, 122 pp.; Antigone Kefala, Fragments, Giramondo, 82 pp.; Greg McLaren, Australian Ravens, Puncher & Wattmann, 112 pp.

Chorale at the Crossing ‘gathers together the work Porter completed after the publication of his final collection, Better than God’.¹ It is an uneven book, with some very good poems, and some, such as ‘A Chip off the Old Blog’, which are little more than creative doodles: one suspects a few of its inclusions are for the sake of having enough poems for a book. That said, there are a dozen or so fully realised pieces, and a few that would make it into the most compact of Porter selecteds. Sean O’Brien has contributed a brief but useful introduction, and Christine Porter has written a thoughtful little afterword on one poem, ‘The Hermit Crab’—a genre we could use a lot more of, judging by the puzzlement with which unpractised but otherwise intelligent readers so often meet contemporary poetry.