I’m told humans can only genuinely experience a natural environment by staying still for at least 10 minutes. Only then do birds and other animals begin to emerge from their cautious retreat. There’s a similar dynamic to reading Ben Walter’s Lithosphere, his debut poetry collection. Initially the poems feel like impressionistic sketches of Tasmanian landscapes: evocative and lyrical, certainly, but minimalist in their dramatic and vocal ambition.
On a closer, slower read, the poems reveal themselves. Their depths, it turns out, are camouflaged by how sonically seductive they are. Refrain, echo, assonance and consonance, along with the sense of constant movement, make these poems undeniably convincing to the body. It can take a while for the mind to catch up.
Many of the poems’ brief scenes acknowledge the agency of non-human lives and even structures. Not only birds, but slugs, ferns, oysters and mountain huts. Mountains themselves are imposing presences in the book, particularly kunanyi, or Mount Wellington. Here we see “frost sprayed on / bare-backed stones” (“Knocking”), feel the “cool vaults hammered from the cloud” (“Neither on this Mountain”).
The speaker in Walter’s poems is invariably in the background, woven into the scene, so that we’re never quite sure whose voice we’re hearing, whether human, individual or collective, animal or land. The poems often end in sudden and haunting strangeness, returning to a self that is unsettled, such as “I crouch in this ghost, / buried in the open air” (“your roots”), “shade blows cool / on my shaking skin” (“Now the Pale Calling”), and “I am fagus in the green havens” (“Neither on this Mountain”).
As a poet, Walter has a lot in common with Les Murray’s compressed, laconic syntax and Robert Adamson’s deep immersion in the non-human world. He differs in his reluctance – or disinterest – in making strong claims for the meaning of the scenes he evokes. If there are opinions in these poems, they’re only the ones embedded in moss, quartz and squall, ones that take patience and effort to hear.
These are enigmatic and uncanny poems, and distinctly Tasmanian, in the sense that the land towers over its human inhabitants. While there is, strangely, little sense here of the climate crisis or of the many violences that haunt the island, Lithosphere does include poems that subtly register the absurdity and precarity of the colonial approach. Walter speaks for many of us when he writes, in “Intertextual Reservations”, “we lurch in lacunae”.
Puncher & Wattmann, 79pp, $27
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
December 6, 2025 as “Lithosphere”.
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