Nicholas Powell’s Trap Landscape, from 2022, writes of poetry as a dangerous lure and trap, a situation which in many of the collection’s poems concerns the writer, while extending naturally in this case to the reader. Landscape, context, and the lure to poetry spell potential disaster. Writing, however, is not so far from desire and even if “foredoomed,” it is irrepressible (39). There’s a feeling of the compulsive in the rhyme of ‘List of Ills’:

I desire flowers delivered
[…]	I wish to fire
this typewriter. Something’s wrong
with the anesthetiser.

(26)

These psychological tensions encompass writing and its perceived outcome. Powell writes of the “model pupil, slighted,” and that “[a] twofold unrequitedness / pinches the minimalist” (‘Jackaroo’s Point of Honour’, 40; 40). Adding to this, the illusion of a poem’s success is identifiable only in hindsight. ‘Fake January’ might be about the media and truth:

Unnecessary costs slug each story that could
have fooled me. And did, a dream

of interpretation

(58)

But, while the above hints at the liability of the false news story, there’s a sense of the writer’s retrospective pain. About a third of the way into the collection, we come to ‘Verdure,’ where the rhyming opening lines, “[b]looming day, you open the bidding. I only / hope this cataclysm lives up to its billing” ironically embrace impending disaster (27). Part of the point in this is that the poet can’t trust their relationship to the world, the language they employ to write it, but neither should they trust in their failure – the question becomes one of self-perception, with the view that self-perceived failure might itself be the illusion. Accordingly, Powell can be said to be writing successfully about failure.

Ideas about context and landscape extend elsewhere to matters of capital and ecology, to the constructed corporate landscape:

Comfort is the watchword
backed by bushiness
atop the famous bluff

where we never get wet
even on rainy days
and where the action is
convenient. The crest

of a wave is ready
to meet your every need

(‘Vandalised Windrows’, 53)

Corporate incursions on the natural world are captured brilliantly in that visually ambiguous word “bushiness,” and the romantic pitch of place ends with the bathos of merely staying dry, an “action” which is at best “convenient.” It’s an insidious world: “[…] the story of the scarlet tanager / is never mentioned, / being immaterial in monetary terms” (43). If the elevated register of the phrase, “[a]nd yet, luxurious ships, I should like to lunch with you,” points to self-importance, it’s the adverb suggesting ironic consumption that’s most damning (43).

Landscape in this case should be differentiated from land, referring to a human rather than natural geography, in the sense of the shaping of land to will, desire. When Powell writes “systematic desensitization / attracts enough environments to his goal,” he writes of a world in which corporate self-interest means an otherwise generalised indifference (‘Algae Washing Up’, 63).

The back cover of the collection points to Powell’s interest in the surreal and absurd, but sometimes it’s a hint of the surreal that captures the real strangeness of the modern world, as is the case with the opening lines of ‘Four Errors Grand Palace’ and their image of pure landscape:

A stream flows through the hotel 
running over the bed to the bank
winding through the muffled buffet
under a footbridge to the giftshop.

(54)

Powell balances abstraction with the more literal image, “a litmus wrist beyond the verandah,” “April meltwater on the trap / cliff spills phantom bridal trains” (‘Vandalized Windrows’, 53; ‘A’, 32). The historically informed ‘Q, Without My Female Typist,’ moves brilliantly between documentary fact, “[t]he Scottish Prince, an early wreck on the Southport Bar,” and an appropriation of the rhetoric of early colonial enterprise (20).

Meanwhile on the Walrus, paddlewheel steamship distillery,

Bring the sugar aboard and dance molasses a fiery white spirit.
For colour add caramel. Age for as little as possible.
Peddle Walrus Rum up and down the River Barrow.

(20)

The historical focus here (constructed with and around alarming quotations from ex-Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen) seems different, however, from most of the poems of Trap Landscape, which are often full of implication, metaphorically abstract. As if to indirectly announce an interest in indeterminacy, Powell writes of “solutions obtained by specific values,” and it’s in the relation between specific and multiple signification that much of my reading of Trap Landscape takes place (58). While Brown favours a lucid directness and intelligibility, so much here is indirect, inexplicit, symbolically infused:

That the value of an item may be set
by members of the country club 
qualifying every response 

should not clump down comforter
or render irrelevant the additional 
space for spontaneous comments.
For if in every church box
the pencil is on the desk, middling,
the lengthy bells peal still.

(‘Grammar Principles’, 39)

The reader’s focus and work concerns the stream of nouns and their potential values. Where terms such as “[t]hat the” and “[f]or if” comprise an active grammar and polemic, their nouns (“country club”, “church box”, “pencil”, “bells”) appear to want a specific value. Noting the irony of the relation of rhetorical device to indeterminate noun, I feel less on-board with the pairing of argument and elusive metaphor.

Each published by Hunter Publishers, Powell and Brown write in two very different modes. Brown’s poems chart shifting thought in appropriately notational form. Open to the moment, they come to suggest the possibility of the poem, beyond thematic, to picture the scope of experience. Powell’s poems are allusive, metaphorical, shifting in their signification, a moving and fluid landscape.