Luke Whitington’s reflective poems express an intense, sensory, deeply felt experience, in a trajectory from first encounter to re-engagement in memory, where a past re-forms and informs a present. It is as if a wine returns to the palate, better for age, to refresh the enduring, embodied soul. This is a significant, complex, thought-provoking and engrossing book. Diachronicity links Italy and Australia, youth and age. Place in Australia is generally lightly identified in the present time of the poem, but sometimes there is a precision of place. The volume, apart from the content of the poems, only lightly identifies or…