David Stavanger’s The Special, winner of the 2013 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, has been described by the English poet Jacob Polley as a ‘collection of curious wisdoms’, and by Australian writer Anna Krien as the ‘dark mad place at 4am’ where ‘Stavanger will be there to keep you company’.

In the surreal landscape of Stavanger’s first full collection, the Queensland writer proves himself a master of ambiguity and suggestion in a world obsessed with exactness, inquisition and immediacy.

To open, Stavanger gives us five definitions of ‘special’. These include ‘sweetheart’, ‘other than the usual’, and ‘to observe a suicidal or psychotic mental health in-patient overnight with limited support or sleep’. It’s our assumption that this definition is true to Stavanger that makes our poetic journey all the more remarkable.

Many of the poems in the collection occupy this fictional space of midnight madness: ‘they wake, active / wanting to talk … you – the Special – / move closer to the window / without moving at all’. Elsewhere, the descriptions of a psychiatric hospital are dribbled in sparsely punctuated prose-poetry: ‘… lights out and try to remember where you came from, visiting hours are between five and ten. park out front, near the row of palms designed to stop the mobile tower across the road from stealing thoughts …’

With intertwining themes of mental health, family and human frailty, Stavanger leads you someplace that looks certain, then tells you you’re standing on the ceiling: he couples tender with ominous, tragic with side-splitting, familial with foreign. In survey, we’re presented with a glass of water and an absurdist mental health questionnaire: ‘8. Every Monday I look forward to / a) others going to work / b) going to work with others / c) watching spiders eat birds.’

Explorations of madness in poetry are hardly new territory, but Stavanger’s frantic dashing between lower-case and upper-case, list-form and free-form, funny and fearless, surreal and realist, is superbly navigated and free from pretension.

Maxine Beneba Clarke’s most recent work is