THE CHURCH OF CONTRADICTIONS: PROSE POEMS
By Michael Crane. Hillside Grove. $19.95.

In its first two sections (out of five) Margaret Bradstock's Barnacle Rock constitutes an interesting flashback to an Australian  poetic concern popular in the late 1950s. In 1960 Douglas Stewart edited Voyager Poems (Jacaranda Press). It neatly summarised a preoccupation that several  Australian poets had had with that succession of sea captains who progressively discovered parts of the Great South Land and took the news back to Europe.

Bradstock has a comparable fascination with these figures but has approached them in a rather new way. Instead of minor epics, reflecting the nature of the voyages themselves, Bradstock has used relatively short poems which make liberal and effective use of journal quotations etc. This technique, along with the poet's (sometimes ironic) reflections on the voyage's significance, tends to create both an intimacy with,  and a re-mythologising of, these important (but now somewhat overlooked) achievements.

One of the most vivid of them is Trompe-l'oeil which persuasively conflates the "five species of vermin / infesting the ship's biscuit" with Cook's first sighting of what would become NSW at Point Hicks – and then his slow trip northwards. "The mountains of Illawarra / reminded Banks of the back of a lean cow; / scraggy hip bones ... stuck out / further than they ought ... / intirely bar'd of their share of covering."

Bradstock's "voyagers" also push on into colonial history, as in A Memoir (thumbnail) of Convict Davies, 1824. Her use of contemporary documents here is an affecting reminder of how far our penal system has come: "His back like a Bullock's Liver and most likely his shoes / full of Blood ... the same man would be flogged / the following day for Neglect of Work".

Other poems, such as Recherche Bay, celebrate more benign moments, in this case the Tasmanian garden built and abandoned by the French in 1792; the remnants of which were thoughtlessly destroyed by government action as recently as 2005.

This event, in effect, foreshadows the preoccupations of the collection's second half where Bradstock, after a few well-turned travel and family poems, engages poetically with environmental pollution. In poems such as The catechism of Loss and The sure extinction, the poet evokes (not without a certain, inevitable preaching) the unwelcome results of our excess consumption. The latter of these two poems describes, inter alia, how: "Mistaken by seabirds for food / brought back to their island nests / sharp-edged fragments tear internal organs / stomachs plastic-filled, they perish." The syntax here may be a bit strange but the message is clear.

If Bradstock's Barnacle Rock is essentially a Sydney book, Michael Crane's The Church of Contradictions: Prose Poems is very much a Melbourne one. Partly the product of that city's performance poetry scene, street-wise yet more than a little naive (or is it faux-naïf?), Crane's poetry rejoices in the contradictions of daily (and nightly) life in Melbourne's inner and western suburbs.

Its somewhat miscellaneous quality is reflected in the book's production values: approximately 138 poems crammed, via two columns, on to 53 pages, together with at least eight typos of varying significance.

Crane's poems here generally fall into two groups; list poems or short fables. They are narrated by a well-disposed onlooker who knows more than a little of the tribulations (and ecstasies) of his characters but who has somehow (so far) managed to avoid their more desperate fates. While songwriters and poets such as  Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Charles Bukowski are referenced, the stance is more reminiscent of Walt Whitman - while also recalling the French proverb, "Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner".

It's also of some interest that the collection is subtitled Prose Poems when its contents are, in fact, lineated. Perhaps Crane wants to emphasise their quotidian dimension and their general eschewing of metaphor. Sometimes, as is often the case with parables, the whole story is a metaphor, even while it has no metaphors within it.

Several of Crane's poems are short enough to quote in full and so illustrate some of his poetic methods. Dilemma is one such. "The greatest mind of his generation, / chief executive of an airline, / on the board of a philanthropic trust, / number one ticket holder of a soccer club, / owner of a champion thoroughbred, / just got a text from his daughter, / telling him she is pregnant, unwed. / He hasn't got a clue what to do next."

Although each line here is a "unit of thought", as Pound recommended, it's also clear why Crane has called it a "prose poem". The language is adequate to the story being told but there is no verbal music to speak of (unless we note the assonance in "pregnant, unwed"). Though the morality of Crane's parables is rarely "orthodox" there is a feeling of the New Testament about them. The collection's strength lies in its compassion; as do, perhaps, its weaknesses. The book's "heart on its sleeve" can be just a bit too prominent sometimes. Perhaps the publisher's  proofreader was a little too forgiving also.

Geoff Page is a Canberra poet and reviewer.