In Apples and Oranges: Adventures in Poetics, Stuart Cooke concedes that his ideas “talk to one another, but how they do this isn’t clear. I can’t shake the idea that each of them makes sense only in relation to one person”.

This is the challenge of the lyric essay. Readers must be willing to piece together disparate fragments: ideas, information and idiosyncrasies.

This is also the lyric essay’s beauty, its textual alchemy. Personal experiences and scholarly knowledge intertwine, generating transformational and often surprising insights.

Apples & Oranges: Adventures in Poetics – Stuart Cooke (Puncher & Wattmann)

The Ruin of Magic: Longing and Belonging in Strange Times – Kate Holden (Black Inc.)

What is transformed in Cooke’s collection, and in Kate Holden’s elegant The Ruin of Magic: Longing and Belonging in Strange Times, is our relation to place: local and global, private and planetary.

Cooke’s interest in the planetary is explicit. He describes encounters with ravens in Death Valley, fish in Brisbane, stray cats in the Andes. He imagines the earth without humanity and reminds us that “music and poetry are not human inventions”.

Holden approaches the planetary through the personal, leaping dizzyingly between the collective and the solitary: “Climate change may blot out the stars from our sight within twenty years. I read this, in silence, on the glass screen of my phone, and know not what to do at this dreadfulness except scroll away.”

Transformative practice

Cooke is interested in poetics in all senses of the word. Several essays in Apples & Oranges are reflections – personal and scholarly – on poetry. Cooke offers new observations on poets, national and international: Robert Gray, Philip Hodgins, Francisco “Kokoy” Guevara.

He is also interested in poetics as a “theory of form”, a transformative practice. His essay on Mexican writer Segio Pitol begins with a contemplation of the way writing can “reverberate through you, like an extra heartbeat”. He ends the collection with a meditation on the voiceless language of trees: “a deeply sensual poetics of touch, permeation, transformation”.

Holden, too, considers poetry and broader poetics. Formally, she takes her readers on spectacular flights through literature, philosophy and history. Her essay The Age of Incredulity, for instance, correlates the “blaze” of poetry with a consideration of “enchantment” as a consoling impulse.

Here is a delicate and leisurely dance through ideas. As Holden puts it, “why must an essay dash like an arrow to its arrival, piercing and startling as it goes?” She leans into........

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