‘Poetry is a speaking picture,’ said Simonides of Keos, and ‘painting a silent poetry’. From ancient Greece until now, these ‘sister arts’ have been frequently conjoined, though it is most often poetry that speaks to or for painting rather than the reverse. We have come to call this interaction ekphrasis (literally, a ‘speaking out’), usually defined as ‘a verbal description of a work of art’. In Classical times it was a school exercise for developing rhetorical skills, but ever since Homer’s elaborate depiction of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, it has been co-opted by poets, especially during the last century.

Australia is timid, insular, conservative. It is unimaginative, hidebound to old orthodoxies, blind to readily identifiable truths. It is meeting with little effective action a host of crises: violence against women, an impending climate catastrophe, intergenerational economic inequality. It has a profound disregard for its First Nations people and, despite a long and significant history of immigration, is hostile to people of colour and people who seek to emigrate to it by boat. It dismisses the arts as so much wankery and regards its environment as a resource to be plundered. It celebrates the philistine and esteems the mining industry as a saviour. Its people cannot lift their eyes beyond parochial and short-term self-interest; the threads that bind them to their communities are fraying. Its public debates are vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation, are dominated by special interests, and are conducted at a volume and pitch too loud and too rancorous to be resolved in ways that serve a common good.

On 22 January 1840, the Mettray Penal Colony officially opened. Mettray was a French prison farm for juvenile criminals that was imitated by other incarceration programs throughout Europe as a disciplinary model. For Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish (1975), its creation was a turning point in human power relations, as its structure reconfigured punishment as discipline and surveillance; it transformed society into a carceral culture. As Foucault claims, power and knowledge are one and the same.

Would-be novelists used to be told that they should write about what they knew. That’s why, over the years, countless volumes have appeared that were at the very least semi-autobiographical.

The Covid-19 pandemic changed our relationship with public health, perhaps irreparably. For many, it also changed their relationship to vaccination. Before Covid-19, few questioned the role of vaccines in public health. However, vaccine mandates, which were conflated – rightly or wrongly – with other mandated health measures, such as social distancing, face masks, and protracted lockdowns, meant that being vaccinated equated to an assault on individual freedom and well-being, the opposite of how vaccines were viewed in the past. Faith in the science supporting them is falling rapidly. According to leading epidemiologist Raina MacIntyre, the ‘impact of the anti-science movement and medical disinformation since the Covid-19 pandemic has been far-reaching’, resulting in lower vaccination rates across many preventable diseases. Add to this the ‘demonization of public health’ following the pandemic and the growing threat of a new pandemic, and you have a perfect public health storm brewing.

Ben Sando Ode’, the second poem in Ken Bolton’s new collection, Metropole, begins with an epigraph from Ted Berrigan: ‘My dream a drink / with Ira Hayes / we discuss the code of the west.’ The poem is pure Bolton: a jovial flâneur perambulates through both external space – Adelaide, where passers-by make ‘BIZARRE ATTEMPTS / AT NORMALCY’ – and an inner life brimming with peers and heroes, quotations, non sequiturs, art criticism, existential musings, and the hum of a poem being made.

Edwin Frank is the founder and editor of the NYRB Classics series and the editorial director of New York Review Books. He is also the author of Snake Train: Poems 1984-2013 and Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel. He co-edited At the Louvre: Poems by 100 contemporary world poets, reviewed on page 55.

‘About Happiness’, the striking opening poem of Kevin Brophy’s latest collection, An Inventory of Longing, anticipates many that follow in the first half of this book. Empathy and reflectiveness are present in a melding of the individual with the social, with landscape, and with the enigmatic passage of time. The poem contains a moment, and it is timeless. It takes its readers on a walk along ‘the river’ in Paris where, at a confluence with a seamy canal, we meet a homeless man who sleeps beneath plastic sheets and shares his phone video of Sufi dancers, whose songs give him happiness and ‘can cure hunger’. ‘Meet’ is the operative word; this is not indifferent observation, but a human exchange. That only one of the parties can eventually walk away is troubling, for reader and speaker. The written poem is evidence of this. The encounter is humbling; the poem reflects deeply on the nature of happiness and, equally, suffering, in the broader context of time, which ‘slips ahead and past us, / pauseless as this river’s sleepless spinning onward happy rush’. In context, the final use of ‘happy’ becomes nuanced.

Genealogy television programs like Who Do You Think You Are? often feature the celebrity gasping – in surprise, excitement, even alarm – as details of their family tree are revealed. Belinda Probert, a distinguished British-born Melbourne academic, had her own moment of incredulity when, four months after her father, Bill, was buried in 1994, her family received a letter from his nephew Denzil. For Denzil, Bill was not Bill, but Uncle Roy, who had spent his childhood living in an impoverished Welsh coal mining village in the Rhondda, and whose mother and siblings were alive when Bill’s children were born. All this was complete news to Bill’s family.

Of  Gustav Mahler’s numerous military sorties, ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’, a miniature from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, is surely the most affecting. It is the eve of battle, and a young woman is visited by her lover, distant trumpet fanfares and dull drumbeats in the air. But perhaps the lover is already dead and it is his spirit she encounters – or it is a premonition of what the morrow will bring. Regardless, Mahler evokes a mixture of tenderness and gloomy foreboding as the young soldier tells his lover that he is going to the green heath far away. ‘There where the splendid trumpets sound / There is my home of green turf.’