Here are three volumes that offer differing responses to a world characterised by injustice, brutality and personal hardship. Far and away the most distinctive (and demanding) of these is Philip Hammial’s sixteenth collection, In the Year of Our Lord Slaughter’s Children.

A contributor to John Tranter’s landmark anthology of 1979, The New Australian Poetry, American-born Hammial is known – though not as well as he might be – for a swathe of surrealist dialogues and meditations. His poetry often illuminates the apparent absurdity of our predicament. There is the account of a 27-year-long traffic jam in With One Skin Less (1994), for example (‘Buskers are making a fortune’), and the poem ‘Hunger’, from Just Desserts (1995), in which he tells the story of a man who ‘decides to pawn those parts of himself that he won’t need for the consumption of food’.