What it means to be Australian POETRY GROUND. By Martin Langford. Puncher & Wattmann. $25.
Reviewer: GEOFF PAGE Martin Langford meditates on this photo in his poem Photograph: Pilmer's Punitive Expedition, Canning Stock Route, 1911.
Photo: Courtesy State Library of Western Australia, The Battye Library G round, a livre compos in 12 sections by the Sydney poet Martin Langford, is a book of politics and meditation - mainly about what, at this stage, it means to be an Australian. Unsurprisingly, there are echoes of Kenneth Slessor, Les Murray and Judith Wright, among others. At times Ground is packed with articulate anger; at others, an almost serene acceptance of different sorts of Australian "bush" - as they actually are, rather than as we might wish them to be. Langford is clearly something of a bushwalker and his expertise shows. He's also a scholar, though his discoveries are imaginative rather than footnoted.
The whole collection is arranged in a rough chronological order, beginning with pre-human Australia and finishing with The Kingfisher's Wings, a poem which looks both backwards over two centuries (and quite a few millennia) and forwards to what might be made here after "this brief spill of water and light / which is where we begin". 
Sections II, III and V deal mainly with 19th-century Australia, with a telling emphasis on the frontier wars and a skilful use of documentary detail to evoke the imperial project poetically. While there is naturally a degree of after- the-event outrage, Langford's judgments are never simplistic.
The poet is also good at suggesting how so many important figures in Australian history were caught up inevitably in the ideologies of their time but remain no less human for that. The beginning of Original Fiction, for instance, captures a good deal (but certainly not all) of the book's tone: "A Captain Cook arrives. / He plants a flag. / After which, New Holland's legal / because this insignia - anthemed / and cheered - snaps and flaps in the breeze. / His Majesty's cannon confirm it."
A variant on this can be seen in Langford's poem, Phillip, which is short enough to quote in full and captures a rather different naivety: "Phillip insisted / traditional hunting grounds /could, without friction, / accommodate soldiers, and convicts, / a whole fledgling town. // Everyone busy / and everything calm and polite! // Until, it would seem, / understandings could not be avoided." It's a nice reversal of the trope that early colonial racial conflict started through misunderstandings.
An example of Langford's balanced approach to our history can also be sensed in his poem, The Victorians, where he smiles, almost indulgently, at their inherent contradictions. They "flensed whales, and clubbed seals, and shot out the doves" but they also "daydreamed of countries for equals" and "danced us the vote". It's always been a complex equation.
Comparable paradoxes can be seen in Photograph: Pilmer's Punitive Expedition, Canning Stock Route, 1911. It's a meditation on a photograph, a device through which poetry can often make a unique contribution to our historical understanding. "Not touching anywhere, square to the camera, / they slouch from their long morning shadows ... / Like those they search for / the bushmen are skilled at survival: it stiffens / their talk to laconics; it swings in their gait." A few lines further on Langford talks of the men's need "for coherence, for rhyme: the gun- casual deaths / of their victims not souring one bit / the old preference for form - / as it hasn't for those who came after - / who have built with such care, / who have so many rules for aesthetics." That is certainly a new take on bush poetry, to say the least.
In section VI (Layers) Langford moves more clearly into the 20th century and towards the end segues into descriptions of the landscapes around Sydney, as they once were and as they have become. Again, the lament for these damaged environments is not mere hand-wringing. The two sides of all this are neatly evoked in The South Colah Bush which begins: "What you do / with a turpentine forest / is level it flat - for the piles, for the cash". It finishes, however, with something far more nuanced and mysterious: "Then what is it leads you - / when night falls, and cars are soft waves - / to stand in the whisper and looseness of air, / while light slides away - and the earth - / and the play of co-ordinates?"
A further element in such lyricism is Langford's unusual, some might say anachronistic, use of the anapaestic metre. A few inattentive readers might hear these poems as standard free verse but most of them are not. Take, for instance, one of the lines just quoted and mark how the stresses fall: "to stand / in the whis/per and loose/ness of air." Like many much older users of anapaests, Langford starts with an iamb and then continues with his line's real metre. The American poet James Dickey was one of the few modern poets to make use of anapaests and it is more than a little interesting to see Langford following in his wake, albeit with very different content. Geoff Page is a Canberra poet and reviewer.