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In the opening poem of Virgil’s Eclogues, a shepherd newly dispossessed of his farm by a soldier returning from war exclaims: ‘There’s so much trouble everywhere these days. / I was trying to drive my goats along the path / And one of them I could hardly get to follow; Just now, among the hazels, she went into labor …’ (trans. David Ferry). More than 600 years later, Poussin’s painting, Les Bergers d’Arcadie, dit aussi Et in Arcadia Ego (1638–40), takes up the theme of dispossession in a more radical key: even shepherds in Arcadia must die. The pastoral mode (taken broadly to include anti- and post-pastoral) has always enveloped threats to the pastoral idyll. John Kinsella’s The New Arcadia – with Poussin’s painting on its cover – is the final instalment of an ‘anti-pastoral’ trilogy initiated by The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (1995) and followed by The Hunt (1998). In The New Arcadia, as in its prequels, we find the pastoral mode in full-blown crisis: in modern Australia, nature’s small misfires (viz. the goat’s ill-timed birth) have escalated into ecological disaster. In The Hunt, the farmers and their families are killed by their own tools, dying in accidents, falling under tractors, shooting themselves; in The New Arcadia, on the other hand, most of the victims are native birds.

Each of these three books is its author’s first, and each carries a cover endorsement by two distinguished poets. You can tell a lot about the books from looking at who endorses whom before you need even to read one of the poems.

The rear cover of Aidan Coleman’s Avenues & Runways (endorsements by Kevin Hart and Peter Goldsworthy) describes him as an imagist. Whatever the exact significance of that term, there is no doubt that this poetry belongs to the class that has slight outward show and rich implications. And the pleasure of reading them is the shuttling between the two. There are at least two important requirements here: the surface has to be elegant and engaging without being slovenly or cute (ah, if you only knew what treasures I conceal!); implications must be intense and never clichéd.

Here is an entry in one of A.D. Hope’s notebooks: it is from 1961: ‘Ingenious devices for letting in the light without allowing you to see out, such as modern techniques provide – e.g., glass brick walls, crinkle-glass, sanded glass and so on – remind me very much of most present-day forms of education.’ This is a representative passage from the notebooks. Lucid itself, it bears on elements of frustration or nullification in experience. As such, it testifies to Hope’s recurrent sense that human beings can easily mislocate their ingenuity, with results that are both memorable and regrettable. In a later notebook, in 1978, speaking of the labyrinth as a model of human life, he writes: ‘Looking back one sees that comparatively trivial blind choices have often determined one’s course and that the majority of people do end up in blind alleys.’ One might contest the generalisation, but will not easily forget the analogy.

Since a new book by Peter Porter is, though precious, also a complex phenomenon, one is stuck with the question of where to begin. The title poem, ‘Afterburner’, is perhaps as good a place as any. It is one of those poems (‘Clear Air Turbulence’ is another in this book) that speculates autobiographically and revisits youth looking for patterns and understandings:

Michael Blakemore’s memoir begins with his departure from Sydney in 1950 to study acting at RADA in London, and ends with him on the threshold of his new career in 1965 as director of such major successes as A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and The National Health. An early enthusiast of Bertoli Brecht, Blakemore made his name directing plays by Peter Nichols. He quickly acquired a reputation for independence and originality, staging plays by Arthur Miller, David Hare, Peter Shaffer, Don DeLillo, David Mamet and seven premieres by Michael Frayn. He worked with his actors, seizing on accidents to build moments of spontaneous truth. This memoir describes his initial fifteen years in English repertory theatre.

Chester Wilmot was killed when the Comet airliner he was flying to London crashed near Rome on 10 January 1954. The ABC and BBC radio journalist had survived six dangerous years as a war correspondent in World War II only to fall victim to an aircraft design fault. Wilmot’s untimely death was also a great loss for Australian history, as he had recently been commissioned to write the volume of the Australian official history on the vital North African battles of Tobruk and Alamein. His best-selling Tobruk 1941: Capture, Siege, Relief (1944) and The Struggle for Europe (1952) indicate that he would have written a history that was authoritative, incisive and enthralling. Neil McDonald suggests in this new book that Wilmot would also have had quite a bit to say about the senior wartime Australian army commander, General Thomas Blamey.