Harmonic

Stephen Oliver's new book, Harmonic, is a tour de force, and I doubt that Australasian letters will see a more important volume of poems in this decade. If his gift in the past has been for the beautifully crafted lyric and the brilliant image, here we have the series of major poems that should cement his reputation, once and for all. It is a volume that takes on, centrally, the modernist inheritance and the difficult question of nature; and if its primary point of departure is Wallace Stevens (a claim which needs some qualification), the result is a Stevens updated by seventy years, a driven examination of the role of the poet and of the imagination in the twilight in which modernism disappears. And the volume as a whole has an architectonic, a movement from an early crisis of metaphysics to a final home-coming, in a brilliant series of poems that celebrate the real. - Nicholas Reid, Antipodes