Gary Catalano was, by profession, a writer about art. But he was also a fine poet with a distinctive style. On no account was he neglected – he appears in most anthologies that ought to include him – but he often seemed to be writing in an entirely different idiom from that of his contemporaries. He was difficult to place and thus, perhaps, difficult to appreciate.

When he died in his mid-fifties in 2002, Catalano left a nearly completed seventh book, The Master of Faux Bois. This, together with a selection from earlier books, makes up Ginninderra Press’s New and Selected Poems 1973–2002. It is worth buying for The Master of Faux Bois alone: more than forty new poems, all deriving from a stay in Paris and the south of France in 1997. Since Catalano’s world is so largely the world of the visual arts, this final book is a kind of coming home, neatly balancing the first book, Remembering the Rural Life (1978), which focused on a childhood spent in Brisbane and on his grandparents’ farm. There are different ways of belonging.