POEMS FROM HERE
By Kathryn Hummel
Walleah Press, $20

Although it has the range of implied directions one might expect in a first collection, Caitlin Maling's Conversations I've Never Had is remarkable mainly for its gritty treatment of childhood and adolescence in Western Australia. Her knowledge of that state's fishing towns and the complex relationships within them is akin to that of the novelist, Tim Winton. Despite (or perhaps because of) her having an MFA in poetry from Houston, Texas, Maling's poems have a rawness and directness that contrasts with many of her young female contemporaries in this country.

Right from the first poem, The path to the dam, there is a strong sense of physicality and risk. The poet doesn't mention her age at the time but the closing lines foreshadow much of what is to come. "... my father /lived elsewhere and I / put my head under / for the first time, / past the warm spot, / swam deep, / it was so dark / and so cold, / there was no / way up."

The poet does surface, however, mainly to the further dangers and confusions of adolescence which she recalls and evokes vividly. In Donnelly River, 13 she remembers (in the present tense): "He's a high jumper at WAIS, which means he's hot, / a boy who would normally throw stuff at me on the bus, / but here I'm the only teenage girl, / so he's willing to pretend for both of us that I'm hot too."

Some readers, looking for something more metaphorical, might consider this language plain, but it seems to work – mainly through the cogency and arrangement of its details. There are also, by way of variation, a few poems derived from Greek myths, e.g. Confessional: Cassandra to Helen and Medea to Jason, where this is less the case.

Sensibly, Maling's autobiographical poems (which predominate) are not arranged chronologically but rather in the random order in which the episodes have recurred in her memory. The forms used are generally free verse but there are also a couple of blank verse sonnets and some other pieces which read almost like prose poems – though they are not right-aligned.

One of the latter, with the same title as Elizabeth Bishop's famous poem, The Fish, is also one of the book's most memorable. The narrator's stepfather brings in a fish he has caught, "a dhuey". Her mother "takes pains to examine it closely ... /  before calling Girls come and see what Greg has brought us / in her smoker's rasp." The two daughters crowd around, with differing reactions. "I look after my girls, (Greg) says, as they smell "the sea/salt on him." "The girls", we presume, includes the mother. "If we were to measure love in fish," the narrator concludes, "my stepfather would be a fishmonger."

It's a nicely ambiguous ending and typical of Maling — who is never reductive in her emotions, for all the apparent simplicity of her language.

Though quite a few poems in Kathryn Hummel's first collection, Poems from Here, are set in Australia, its dominant feelings appear to be those of an expatriate. The bio note tells us that Hummel has lived for significant periods in India and Bangladesh where the research for her PhD in narrative ethnography was carried out.

The book is arranged in three sections, the first of which is entirely devoted to the subcontinent. Poems such as Gentlemanwallah are written by someone who has moved past the first shock those countries inevitably generate and is now able to be both more observant and dispassionate. And yet there are good reasons why the poet doesn't fly "home" immediately. Something in this balance can be detected in the last stanza of Gentlemanwallah: "Crossing his legs on his rickshaw seat / to prevent creases in imagined trousers / he leans back and considers the sky / with the leisure of a full pocket / and the smoke ice-white in his hot heavy eyes."

Many of Hummel's poems are frankly personal and, in an author's note, she accepts that this sort of writing involves an "exposure" which means "inviting in danger, and a loss of control". Quite a few of the poems are dated and the place of composition given. This can sometimes seem self-conscious and slightly diaristic – as if we're being given more information than we want about real people we don't know. The frustration of unresolved relationships is a recurring topic. "Fulfilment should be more than just / a negative of what we have not got," she writes at the end of Last Drinks in Adelaide II.

The book's second and third parts are more often set in Australia (Adelaide, in particular) but there are still references back to Bangladesh. There are several fine poems scattered through these sections. My Mother's Friends is a memorable example. It ends: "They hallo. I hallo in return, / stunned by the incision of their interrogation. / Their minds, tuned in, whir the complex code / and enmesh in the net of home."