AustLit

'In Infernal Topographies, Graeme Miles traverses mythology, landscape and notions of selfhood to reveal moments of approachability and tenderness that are rare in Australian poetry. The poems are not so self-referential, nor overtly ambitious. Miles wants to get lost in the musicality of the moment, or the surrender of a second, and so his poems tend to read like reflections on an event that would have otherwise been lost to the everyday eye. Such is the charm of his words. When one reads Infernal Topographies, one reads them not to witness an act of innovation, or sound and image taken to completely new directions, but to meditate on one singular Tasmanian’s relationship to selfhood and tradition.' (Introduction)

'In approaching a new collection of poetry, a reviewer hopes that a series of themes or poetic preoccupations will quickly emerge to give the necessary “hooks” for said reviewer to arrange some neat conclusions. With Infernal Topographies this task is not quite so simple or straightforward. In this third collection by Miles, clear themes and resolutions are not so apparent and often meanings are left dangling.' (Introduction)

'In a poetic culture where individual poems often seem to be cut from slabs of discourse spun out from a recognisable set of obsessions, Graeme Miles’s poems stand out as having a strong individual integrity. They are poems (this is his third book after Phosphorescence and Recurrence) which, in other words, you have to live inside a bit before they begin to suggest their power. The “recognisable set of obsessions” is there but because each poem tries to be a free-standing event, it might be better to call them interests. It does pose a problem for a reviewer since the default approach is usually to search out underlying themes. I’ll be doing this in the case of the poems from Infernal Topographies but at the back of my mind is always the knowledge that the best approach to poems like this (as in the case of the poems of Peter Porter, say) would be to look at a few in detail and comment fairly obliquely on their shared themes. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make for a good or readable review for readers looking for some overall sense of what a book is doing. So I’ll look mainly for patterns of themes but compensate by calling them “interests” to try to take away some of their usual dominance. If I’ve space, at the end I’ll look at one or two poems in detail.' (Introduction)