SALT AND BONE
Zenobia Frost
Walleah Press, $20

Melbourne poet, Lisa Jacobson's first collection, Hair & Skin & Teeth, came out in 1995. In 2012 her verse novel, The Sunlit Zone, was enthusiastically reviewed, shortlisted for numerous poetry awards and won the John Bray Poetry Prize in 2014. Her second collection, South in the World, thus arrives with some considerable expectations.

At 110 pages, South in the World ranges widely but may also be a bit too long for its own good. The poet has changed and developed since 1995 and this can be sensed throughout – though the poems are not obviously arranged chronologically.

They reach back into the poet's own childhood and into that of her daughter. There are particular concerns with horses, dogs and other animals. And with some major public events, such as the 2009 Victorian bushfires. Throughout the book's five sections the poet's main impulse, as Chris Wallace-Crabbe notes, is strong emotion. He suggests that Jacobson's poems demonstrate how "intensity of feeling can generate lyrical ease". This is certainly the case in some of the book's best poems (for example, the love poems in section four) but is not always the case.

At times the presentation of emotions is a little too direct, resulting in a diaristic effect rather than a poetic one. At the end of The Memory Wire (in section one ) the poet notes: "Often a strange sorrow filled my hours. / This was in the days of childhood / yet I was happy then." If this feels a little over-generalised it is immediately corrected, however, by the next poem, Stable Boys, a graphic account of an attempted sexual assault when the poet was young and naive – and of her escape through quick-thinking, determination and the lucky decency of one of her would-be attackers.

The poems are not all autobiographical, however. There is a non-confessional religious undertone to quite a number – and a willingness to joke about such things. The Virgin Gets Postnatal Depression is just one example. In Habits Formed by Eternity, Jacobson imagines God "in his faded cardigan, / wishing we'd made him more stylish" but her humour is far from callow or dismissive. The poem ends persuasively with: "God reads slowly, a habit formed by eternity. / New starts are discovered and cures for cancer / but not much else. A woman turns like fruit / to the light. God hears her heart beat: / kaboom! kaboom! and travels towards it, / to sit with her loneliness up against his."

This god is a good deal more compassionate than the Old Testament variety one might perhaps have expected from the poet's heritage. In several poems in section two, Jewish issues are addressed with imagination and compassion – though not without risk. Her poem, Photographs of Jews, set in the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, ends with the disturbing question: "And what if I told you all those bones and teeth / hold for me a terrible beauty." In Old Nazis Jacobson describes an elderly Melbourne couple: "They are two old Nazis after all / who've long lost interest in their cause, / the urge to search attics or under floors."

As noted already, Jacobson's poems range and vary. Another dimension is the erotic poems that begin section three. They have a specificity and an individuality which is compelling – and segue, understandably enough, through to pregnancy and motherhood. The balance is most neatly held in the poem, Morning Ride, where the poet completes her description of schoolgirls on a train with: "Something's begun, some urgent heartstrong need / for root and seed that no old god can halt, // no worn-out creed. The train groans to a stop. / The girls get off in a flecked-skirt, skittish mob, // disperse. And yet, the taut wire of their want / persists; the sharp desire, its imperative."

Zenobia Frost's first book, Salt and Bone, at a slim 63 pages, is very different from South in the World though Frost's work is far from being without emotion. Frost is much more a follower of Emily Dickinson's injunction to "Tell it slant". Her poems sometimes risk obscurity but generally repay multiple readings.

Frost is (currently) from Brisbane and there's a strong feeling of that city and its weather about many of her poems. Even the cover illustration features a black-and-white drawing of a "Queenslander", with its steps going straight up to a weatherboard verandah.

The opening lines of Melt are a good example of Frost's "local colour": "The city bursts: / a potion of silt / and lost fish heads". Or, later in the same poem: "We hibernate nude / in homes with more windows / than walls, glass-bottom / boats tied up at the doors."

The collection has a healthy number of love poems, too – which also reflect the city they are set in. In After Midnight: Toowong the poet presents herself and her lover in "The night's swelter / cut with lemon myrtle" as they "slink between ibis-legged houses / and wakeful graveyards." The poem ends with a couple of memorably rhythmic phrases, often a feature of Frost's best work: "We belong // to the hour of the curlew – / to the blues of its determined song." The word "blues" has a nice ambiguity too. It could be synaesthesia — or the musical form. It works well either way.

As with most first collections, Salt and Bone has a couple of atypical poems which really stand out. One is the historical Cimitiere des Innocents, 1786 which, in tightly controlled and rhyming dimeters, disconcertingly (but not explicitly) foreshadows the fate of European Jews under Hitler.

The other "one-off" is Frost's seven-page sequence, Of the Moment, an effectively idiosyncratic evocation of allied POWs under the Japanese in Changi and Thailand. One suspects a close family connection here but, while a name is given, the relationship is not made clear. The first poem, which establishes the sequence's narrative frame, concludes with "I hang washing / and, with each breath, / fabricate memories".

Her "memories" seem far from "fabricated", however. Poem #2 is rich with all sorts of period detail as the male protagonist ill-fatedly takes ship in December 1941 from one outpost of the British Empire to another (Kenya to Singapore). The third poem is a fleeting reference to the retreat of the British and Australians down through Malayan peninsula to Singapore. The the fourth tellingly describes what happened in February '42: " 70,000 men surrendered. // Tin helmets in a silvery pile ...". The fifth and six poems cleverly imply what's happening "off the page", as it were, by concentrating on food, a key preoccupation for the prisoners. Poem #7 has our protagonist back in Sydney in early 1946 with a notebook and a photo in his pocket "of 100 Norfolk men dressed / in the last of their skin." The sequence ends with a six-line envoi, worth quoting in full as an example of what Frost's often "slant" approach can achieve: "dredge the bones / from the river // shroud the bodies / in rice sacking // by boat or foot / the years go on." It's a strong way of suggesting how such sufferings can etch themselves into our collective memory.