Martin Harrison’s poems have a fine discursive quality, which means that they often read like essays. Take ‘Midday’, from his recent volume Summer (2002), where a hand-scythe and the ABC radio news produce a meditation on time and place not dissimilar in its conclusion to that offered on several occasions in the essays included in Who Wants to Create Australia? ‘Only a little can be added to an everyday sense of life – / a singularity, a slowed-down look, faster than light, / a sense of movement out of nowhere, now, here.’

Since Harrison’s poems are like verse essays, I found myself wondering whether his essays might not be like poems. An eccentric idea, quickly dismissed, since his essays are big productions – filled with thought, with the struggle of thought towards clarification and definition – and depend heavily on the gestural resources of prose. Harrison’s essays can nevertheless be read as performances, even if they are not poetic ones. Rhetorical, theatrical, dramatic, they foreground both the process of thinking and the perplexity, the vulnerability, and the determination of the thinker himself, as he grapples with the nature of poetry.