The Steyne Hotel

"I'm waiting on a balcony overlooking Manly concourse / knowing that you'll be travelling through the south-coast fires / now licking Sussex Inlet and Lake Conjo"

Bushfires, Sydney's beachside suburbs, and longing. Name three themes of contemporary Australian poetry.

I love Jennnifer Harrison's The Steyne Hotel (from her 2006 collection, Folly and Grief) for many reasons.

The poem is full of individually wonderful lines: "From space the sea might be a coarse blue cloth, two white narcissi / papering either end of the earth."

But it's the way the poem shifts between our inner lives and outer environment that makes it. More precisely, it's the way it weaves those things together, the dialogue between them, their inseparability, that gets me every time.

We get multiple lines or whole stanzas of description of what the poet sees from the balcony at the Steyne Hotel:

"It's late afternoon and the last few boats will soon return from / pleasuring the sea to pass through the netted colours of sunset. / Below where I sit with my notebook and beer, a crowd gathers / to watch an elderly clown play the spoons..."

Only to be suddenly returned back 'inside': "Friend, I'm expecting you soon."

The act of waiting, the call to the friend, is full of tenderness, love and sorrow. With each subsequent call (with each return from the outer world to the inner) the weight of both that love and that sorrow increases until, in the final stanza, it reaches a kind of crescendo or revelation:

"Surf, kelp, the wind scratching over a gutted mattress - a paper / bag of plums - your old car - the radiotherapy machine / hulking over both our memories. Friend, come soon."

Crucially, Harrison doesn't leave things there. The radiotherapy machine hulking over our memories does not have the last word. The world does. Objects do. The iconic highway known intimately by all Australians - the Hume - does:

"They're playing beach volleyball in bikinis, two to a team / and I'm calling you safely through the firestorms of what we have seen, / sorrowsmoke lying heavy on Highway 1 and the Hume."