joanne burns: There’s a name to conjure with. The familiar lowercase signature – first encountered in my now-tattered copies of 1970s women’s poetry magazines such as Khasmik and Cauldron, and in the anthologies Mother, I’m Rooted (1975) and No Regrets (1979) – now appears on burns’s fourteenth book. An Illustrated History of Dairies offers a generous selection of her verse and prose poems, including the satires on (sub)urban life for which she is well known, condensed narrative pieces, enigmatic fragments linked by flashes of surrealist wit.

Like all of her books, this one offers fresh directions and perceptions. Ever since I heard joanne burns read at a conference in Sydney in 2004 and realised what brilliant performance scripts these poems are, I find I listen to them more attentively as I read, almost hearing the mobile intelligence at work. There are her characteristic dramatic monologues, like ‘pluck’, in the voice of a robot, which begins by alluding to its precedent in Robert Browning (‘that’s my last master hanging on the wall’):