John Mateer’s fifth poetry collection confirms him as a poet of considerable assurance and originality. The Ancient Capital of Images is, in a sense, a metaphor for the poetic imagination – the entity formerly known as the Muse. The terrain ranges from South Africa to Australia to Japan. It is in the latter section that his achievement is most impressive. There is little here of the travelogue, the sense being rather of an inward journey.

The idea of home is a distinct motif in Mateer’s interrogations of his relationship to both Australia and South Africa, and these represent the most overtly political parts of the book. I found the South African section particularly engaging, the poems more closely realised. At the outset, in ‘The Kramat of Tuan Guru’, Mateer acknowledges the uneasy truce between poetry and experience: ‘Outside your tomb, staring at the bright Atlantic / my thoughts aren’t words, are this listening – .’ Particularly affecting is ‘An Empty Flat’, about his father, with its wonderful juxtapositions: ‘a box of ashes; the family handgun; / and memories absent from this poem.’