Peter Bakowski’s Days That We Couldn’t Rehearse is in many ways the most consistent and satisfying of his five collections to date. He has cultivated strengths and eliminated weaknesses found in earlier volumes. Yet it is unmistakably Bakowski; to mimic his much-loved crime fiction imagery, his prints are all over the scene.

Bakowski’s strong suit has always been the common object used to striking and, at times, surreal effect. The everydayness of his imagery, the simplicity of his language, the straightforwardness of his thought, are all of a piece with his conception of the poet’s role as speaking to the wider public: ‘trying to say things / truthful, humorous or important’ (‘Against the Odds’). In ‘St Kilda Blues, Melbourne, 1989’, the second-person protagonist looks up an old girlfriend with the idea of saying he’s still crazy about her, only to discover that she has a new man: ‘You’re a dartboard / and each sentence about him / is a bull’s eye.’ This sort of simple but arresting language is a feature of the collection.