Approaching a new book by Sydney’s Peter Minter, we are afforded the opportunity to see where a maturing poet is headed. A few years ago, he was very much identified with cutting-edge poetics. More interested in the epistemology of language than most of our poets, he could be seen as an experimental ally of, say, Michael Farrell and the American, Andrew Zawacki. Yet there was sometimes a whiff of the academy about his projects, a certain cerebral coldness. The poems kept holding us at a slippery arms’ length. Cunningly though, he opens the main flow of his new book with Ed Dorn’s concise observation that ‘All academics are hopeless’.