Anthony Lynch's poetry persuades us into its unique atmosphere, rich with detail - a loved car anthropomorphises, 'a yacht club's dry dock / is a bookcase for boats', 'The first magpie / undoes the dark'.
These poems hymn and lament the world. Canola is spray-painted across paddocks; 'a television / talks to the walls'. There is variety in style from resonant pantoums to the fittingly halting 'Elegy' - 'a short speech of road / where the blackbird strings up worms / plaques buttoning earth'. Lynch's meticulous description subtly implicates rather than specifies in these tightly wrought poems that finish unexpectedly, the endings often an entrance to the poem - 'Now, here is my opening'.
The book's last section is a meditation on mortality, with its awkward suburban mourners and callous duck shooters, but also a tower of memory that reels back to its origin, to birth, the night train leading into day.