Hallucination

The late Les Murray described Jamie Grant’s work as “poems of scrupulous craftsmanship and unlinking intelligence, poems which pay acute attention to the contours of experience.” This new collection, which is divided into five discrete sections, focuses that attention on the twenty-first century world, its office buildings and hospitals, motorways and wind farms, while also looking back to characters and events from earlier times. There are also observations of Australia’s natural environment, its forests, farms, birds and animals. The last of the five sections is a series of versified thumbnail sketches of historical figures whose achievements helped to shape the present age. And there is even an elegy for Les Murray among the other verses.