Reviewed by Geoff Page

The List of Last Remaining is a timely collection from Adelaide poet Louise Nicholas and should help bring her the national attention she has long deserved. Nicholas is one of those poets who can use the autobiographical "I" extensively and not sound bombastic or precious as a result. Although her poems have a real relish for language they are also often quite colloquial which, in turn, helps to reinforce the universality of her private experiences.

In some ways, like the work of many other poets, The List of Last Remaining is a kind of disguised memoir. The first of its five sections focuses on the poet's parents and episodes from her own childhood. There is a wryly humorous account of the conception of an "afterthought" fifth child and a fondly non-judgmental portrait of her father who went to the same school as Sir Robert Helpmann but would have been inclined, Nicholas reveals, to tell Rudolf Nureyev "to get a haircut and a proper job". There's a poignant poem, too, about what appears to be the same person — "a bomber pilot in the war" but also a man who suffers unacknowledged attacks of PTSD when forced to shoot rabbits for food.

Nicholas' portraits of her younger self in these poems are playful, ironic and persuasively detailed. At the end of Aged thirteen, for instance, the poet realises she is now in the sway of forces much larger than herself, forces "as yet un-named and infinitely more dangerous" than anything encountered to that point.

The memoir develops with an account over several poems of the poet's experience in an Israeli kibbutz. They deftly foreshadow the more complex problems that have developed in that region since.

The third section deals, in turn, with her own two children, their birth and early childhood and her parents' decline and death. Nicholas' poem Last day is one of the book's most effective with its central image her mother's grown children around her death bed "tell(ing) her it was time to say goodbye". "She lifted her head and looked at us, / startled, frightened, as though we, her children, / were prising her fingers loose, pushing her / towards a place she had no wish to go." The language here may be plain but the underlying metaphor is convincing

The last two sections of The List of Last Remaining widen out to a more general commentary on current events, such as the disappearance of MH17, and to some sly commentary on both the persisting imbalance of power between the sexes (Sunday Afternoon Arts) and the unique particularities of some women (The precise woman on a south-seas cruise). Towards the end is a series of "tribute" poems, which cleverly address issues famously raised by notable poets remote in either space or time. Thus we have, in My Last Duke, an assertive reply from Browning's murdered duchess — and a more than slightly ambivalent poem affecting to copy the explicit sexual references in the poetry of the American poet, Sharon Olds.

All these poems are witty and many of them sardonic too. One of the most characteristic, Breakfast, is short enough to quote in full: "At last came the day / when she sat down to her morning egg, / severed its egg-y head, / scooped out its egg-y brains, / mashed them till they bled, / spread them on a pyre of burnt toast / ate the egg-ing things // and hardly thought of him at all."

Geoff Page is a local poet and reviewer.