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$155 www.australianbookreview.com.au states, observing human interactions ‘among the pines’. They evoke a camera panning slowly, as in a quiet and visually arresting film, but are not as powerful as the tauter lyrics, especially those that make up the first section. The contemporary lyric can feel tired, but there is some skilful and affecting craft here: ‘In the clear light, the fields are born / again’ (‘Prodigal’).

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Literary surrealism was contemporary to the blossoming of non-lineated verse in France in the early twentieth century, and it is the dominant mode in Misbah Wolf’s Carapace (Vagabond Press, $25 pb, 48 pp). Within its pages, images continually blur into each other, and time feels sluggish or suspended.

Readers opening this slim volume will notice that all but one of Wolf’s poem titles have ‘House’ appended: ‘All We Ever Wanted Was Everything House’; ‘Hounds of Love House’; ‘Mrs Robinson’s House,’ etc. (the exception is the wryly titled ‘H is For’). The word ‘house’ also features in the body of many poems. I was puzzled at first by this titular motif. I played with different interpretations: each prose poem formally evokes a house, which is a ‘carapace’ for Wolf’s imagination; the poems are set inside various houses or ‘carapaces’; connected to these two interpretations, the speaker of the poems dwells in and continually moves between houses/prose poems. The collection also reminded me – thematically not formally – of Omar Sakr’s These Wild Houses (2017). The publisher’s website says that Carapace: ‘archives the journey of a young girl towards developing, losing, and leaving relationships within share-houses.’ It is fluid enough to sustain all these readings. Here is a sample of its poetics, from ‘Master Builder House’:

It nestles its haunches upon the sinking reeds. Headless water lilies, aqueous ink plucked by leathery hands find themselves in designated jars around the ordinary house, and a group of us commit to memory the shape of spangled seawater …

Moments of realism bleed into surrealism, with the latter often peaking: ‘I fall through the egg and find myself lying in sand’ (‘Memories of Green House’). The poems are vivid, especially when sex enters the picture, as in ‘Under the Pink House’: ‘Your / tits sent our [sic] whips that lassoed me to the bed, and your pussy adopted / the same penetrating gaze, a cabalistic cipher where occult forces dimly / sounded.’ Such lines often combine eroticism with absurd comedy. ‘Rebel Girl House’ begins: ‘She is obsessed with reading other people’s clitorises. Sometimes she / skips to the ending and sometimes she reads them aloud to herself.’

The represented experience is both fleshy and of the unconscious. I was initially disoriented by the highly associative and sometimes random connections in the work. Then I told myself I was searching needlessly, in the absence of lyric compression, for narrative resolution. Carapace delivers something else entirely, asking you to give in to its dream logic. g

Prithvi Varatharajan is a poet, essayist, and sometimes literary audio producer. His début collection of poems and prose, Entries, was published in 2020 by Cordite Books.