Stephanie Johnson: Moody Bitch: Poems of the Last Two Decades

Reviewed by PENELOPE BIEDER

Thirty-nine poems, stepping along 20 years in a writer's life from her mid-20s to her more assured mid-40s, could mean almost two poems a year, but that is not what happens here.

In one of seven early poems from 1987 alone, Stephanie Johnson asks: "What is poetry now, anyway?" And goes on to provide an answer of sorts: "Lines set down/ some self-conscious thoughts/ inconsequential and teeming/ worse than streptococci."

A reading of this collection makes you wonder if she is both repelled and attracted by the poetry she has produced.

A well-established and much-awarded novelist - she was celebrated this year as winner of the Deutz Medal for Fiction in the Montana Book Awards for The Shag Incident - you also sense here that poems may be a safety valve for Johnson, where she lets off steam.

It is fascinating to see her development as a poet over these two decades, and as the poet grows up she still speaks with the same, surprisingly uncertain voice. But it's the uncertainty and self-confessed vulnerability that is attractive and makes these poems so dangerously intimate.

Disparaging, disdainful, pensive one moment, wild the next, she draws you in on one page, only to chill you out on the next. Never afraid of staring down the squalor of domesticity, Johnson comes across as the universal mother, fiercely protective of her three children, far more sure-footed in the well-travelled country of exhausted motherhood than when she is poring over the map of love and intimacy: "In your company I am somehow less than the sum of myself."

These are for the most part entertaining, accessible, ironic poems, observant and funny and passionate. An uneven quality from one poem to the next could be explained by the collection's title - Johnson is quite unafraid of acknowledging good days and bad days: "But I'm here stuck/ with a book that won't finish, sick to death/ of myself."

And just when you think, oh dear, the humour is so dark - "The curtain discharges sludge/ to the bath's orphaned pubis" - she trips you up with a gorgeous line about parents out for a wintry walk with their small children at dusk: "We are their moving landmarks/ points of return/ two towers of light in the darkening streets."

Godwit, $22.95