Alex Skovron has always been a clever poet, sometimes playfully so, more often seriously so. Skovron, who was born in Poland in 1948 and came to Australia, via Israel, in 1958, is steeped in the European intellectual tradition, though he wears his erudition lightly. Like almost everyone else, Skovron is troubled by the twentieth century: it seems to hang over the horizon of this book. He is also concerned about the nineteenth. As he says in ‘The Centuries’: ‘It is necessary to remind oneself / that the nineteenth century has never really left us: / it has been here all along, biding its time.’

The Man and the Map, Skovron’s fourth book in fifteen years, is in two sections: micro and macro; autobiographical and universal. It starts with the almost naïve simplicity of ‘Polish Corridors’ – a child’s wonder at phenomena it doesn’t understand and is worried by – then moves through a less than assured, ironically remembered adolescence to a number of travel poems that say a good deal more than they seem to. Along the way, there are also fine evocations of Sydney university life in the 1960s and some clever sexual embroidery in ‘Legend’. The first half also includes a number of convincing meditations on the nature and limitations of memory, in poems such as ‘Ago’, ‘And Yes’, ‘Elegy’ and ‘Eclipse’.