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\n Lithosphere<\/p>\n
I\u2019m 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\u2019s a similar dynamic to reading Ben Walter\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Many of the poems\u2019 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 \u201cfrost sprayed on\u2009\/ bare-backed stones\u201d (\u201cKnocking\u201d), feel the \u201ccool vaults hammered from the cloud\u201d (\u201cNeither on this Mountain\u201d).<\/p>\n
The speaker in Walter\u2019s poems is invariably in the background, woven into the scene, so that we\u2019re never quite sure whose voice we\u2019re 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 \u201cI crouch in this ghost,\u2009\/ buried in the open air\u201d (\u201cyour roots\u201d), \u201cshade blows cool\u2009\/ on my shaking skin\u201d (\u201cNow the Pale Calling\u201d), and \u201cI am fagus in the green havens\u201d (\u201cNeither on this Mountain\u201d).<\/p>\n
As a poet, Walter has a lot in common with Les Murray\u2019s compressed, laconic syntax and Robert Adamson\u2019s deep immersion in the non-human world. He differs in his reluctance \u2013 or disinterest \u2013 in making strong claims for the meaning of the scenes he evokes. If there are opinions in these poems, they\u2019re only the ones embedded in moss, quartz and squall, ones that take patience and effort to hear.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cIntertextual Reservations\u201d, \u201cwe lurch in lacunae\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Puncher & Wattmann, 79pp, $27<\/p>\n
\n This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
\n December 6, 2025 as “Lithosphere”.<\/p>\n
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\n Lithosphere<\/p>\n
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