Second Thoughts
By B.N. Oakman. Interactive Press. $25

Verse autobiographies are a courageous genre. There's so much to cover in a short space and it's so hard to be truthful without offending others. There's also the problem of universality. How interesting will your life be to readers who don't know you personally?

Interestingly, in Cut a Long Story Short, Peter Lach-Newinsky finds his way around all these difficulties rather adeptly. The title concedes the first point and no-one, except perhaps one of his Russian ancestors, suffers significant personal damage. There is no sense, however, of punches being pulled.

Cut a Long Story Short begins with the experience of the poet's parents and grandparents in wartime Europe, most particularly Germany. The descriptions are vivid, particular and strongly felt – and neatly set off by fragments of factual information at the end of almost every poem about what is happening more widely. They act as a sort of leitmotiv.

Fairly typical is What was the war like Mummy, a prose poem recalling verbatim the poet's mother's experience of allied incendiary bombing raids. "Omi got the bomb onto her dustpan and threw it out the window ..." And later she tells her young son: "Daddy and I, we both said after the war was over thank God no more bombs".

The Slap of History, another prose poem, deals with the poet's paternal "White" Russian ancestry and a family estate which "still sits millennial proud prosaic as history on a rise above its old serf villages it has sucked lean as ribs for centuries".

Lach-Newinsky then proceeds to his migrant childhood and adolescence, both subjects well-treated by other poets of European origin such as Pi O, Peter Skrzynecki and Alex Skovron. The migrant experiences here are both different – and yet not so different. In North Head the poet remembers: "giving way / slowly to an unknown tide / in her cramped Austin / full of fumbling desire / with AXX number plates: praise! ... / / the first magic hand now / deftly demolishing / the door / to the cage / of / childhood."

The narrative then advances to the poet's responsibilities as a husband and father, still with almost all the poems having their after-note in which wars, such as those in Vietnam and Iraq, are intercut with the advent of gadgets and technologies symbolic of their period.

Cut a Long Story Short moves rapidly onwards. The baby born on page 93 is installed in a university college on page 114. The book ends with several poems describing, in brave and sharply-observed detail, the poet's experience of cancer and his apparent recovery: "In truth you're back at square one / minus some gut and arse, no wisdom felt, / no sweet Eurydice sung back up from // suffering nor duende dealt from Jimmy / Dancer's sado-touch." (Five Storeys Down: A Travelogue, Part 5, 'Recovery').

B.N. Oakman's Second Thoughts is a very different sort of book – much shorter for a start and a tight collection of free-standing poems. Some are related by subject matter, e.g. the poet's deep appreciation of the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado (1875-1939) and Spain more generally. Others have a reasonably savage political edge; still others are love poems to his partner, Barbara, who has been prone to serious illness in recent years.

Nearly all the poems are strongly affecting emotionally, partly as a result of Oakman's unusual skill with last lines. These can turn quite suddenly in a new and disconcerting direction – or brutally sum up what we've just seen. This directness of feeling, along with Oakman's leftish political edge and fluency with different linguistic registers, brings to mind the early poetry of Bruce Dawe when he was making his mark on the somewhat conservative Australian poetry establishment of the mid-1960s.

Two early poems stand out in this regard – Neurosurgery and Watching TV News in Madrid, All Saints Day 2011. The first reminds us how, when visiting a loved one in hospital, we can also be deeply upset by the situation and fate of other patients we don't even know. Neurosurgery is constructed of simple observations, cleverly arranged, e.g. the rapid plot development in: "She'll be dead by now / The woman with bright curly hair / The one I saw in Admissions / She and her man and her boy and her girl." Later, the poet sees the woman's empty room and senses the impact her death has had on all three members of her family. The poem concludes: "And then I returned to another room to sit beside another bed / And I took a woman's hand in mine / And gripped it / Hard / Too hard / Much too hard".

The second poem, Watching TV News in Madrid ... is one of several set in Spain, often dealing with the impact of the Spanish Civil War.  Oakman watches an old man on the television screen whose "words defeat my  feeble Spanish". He is looking through graves recently excavated in "a town overrun by rebels early in the war. / The weeping man is Rafael Martinez. / He is 89 years old. He's searching for his father."

Among the other 47 poems in Second Thoughts, there are many of comparable quality. Don't read them in a coffee bar; you might well embarrass yourself by shedding justified but unseemly tears.