Contemporary Australian poetry is such a rich field, and so unjustly neglected, I find it hard to narrow these recommendations down, so just think of this as an introductory sampler. Hopefully all the books I mention are still in print (not always certain even with the best-known of poets) but if that proves to be incorrect you can always try the library, the second-hand bookshops, or the internet. One useful site for out-of-print books is http://www.bibliofind.com
For those readers more used to a prose diet, the verse novel is a good place to start. One I'd recommend is The Scarring by Geoff Page (Hale and Iremonger) a powerful and disturbing tale set on a Clarence River farm between the 1920s and the 1980s. With its themes of fertility and sterility, this is no simple bush saga, but a disquieting and tragic weave of psychology and history.
Set in a far more urban milieu and composed in freer verse is the late Dorothy Porter's The Monkey's Mask (Hyland House.) When it was first published in 1995 it reached the best-seller list in Australia, a rare feat for a book of poems. I could be wrong, but I'd guess that hasn't happened since C J Dennis and The Sentimental Bloke. It's a hard-edged crime thriller, a tale of sex and murder set in the Sydney literary scene.
Not so much a verse novel as a sequence of poems, John Foulcher's The Learning Curve(Brandl and Schlesinger) is a portrait of a fictitious secondary school. It's sharp, often hilarious and sometimes very touching. It's great reading for teachers and students alike.
The pastoral continues to have a strong place in our contemporary poetry.
Spring Forest (Angus and Robertson) by Geoffrey Lehmann is based on the memories of Ross McInerney, a farmer at Koorawatha on the western slopes of New South Wales. The name of Ross's farm is Spring Forest, and the poems reflect the folk history of the area and Ross's life on the land, as well as the intrusions of a larger history. Written over a period of twenty years (it first appeared as Ross's Poems in 1978) Spring Forest is really a single long poem brilliantly evoking a disappearing world. Laconic and conversational (because it is based on real conversations) it is also poignant and philosophical. If the A&R edition with its marvellous old photographs is now out of print, most of the Spring Forest poems can be found in Lehmann's Collected Poems(William Heinemann Australia.)
Wheatlands (Fremantle Arts Centre Press) by John Kinsella and Dorothy Hewett, is a collaborative book of poetry and prose. Born forty years apart, the authors grew up in the same part of Western Australia, known as the Wheatbelt. While each poet writes about the same area, they see it from different gender viewpoints and generations. Dorothy Hewett's vision has a more small-town, human scale, though embellished with her characteristic love of myth. Her realism is laced with a capital "R" Romanticism. John Kinsella on the other hand, sees the humans in the landscape dwarfed by environmental degradation and the demands of agribusiness. Kinsella (as his other books reveal) is also more interested in linguistic innovation and in writing the 'anti-pastoral pastoral'. While we're talking about the contemporary pastoral, I'd also recommend New Selected Poems (Duffy and Snellgrove ) by Philip Hodgins, Broken Land - Five Days in Bre(Five Islands Press) by Coral Hull, and New and Selected Poems (UQP) by Anthony Lawrence which contains his verse novella Blood Oath.
Les Murray is often thought of as a pastoral poet and it's true many of his best poems are intimately connected with a life on the land, but a glance at his Collected Poems (Duffy and Snellgrove) will reveal that he is also very much a poet of towns and cities and highways. This is a big book in every sense and contains all the poetry Les Murray wants to preserve from 1961-2002, excluding his verse novel Freddy Neptune. The book also comes with a CD of the poet reading fifty-five of his works. Les Murray's writing has been compared to Walt Whitman's in his desire to convert all he experiences to poetry, and in his long-lined, vigorous, onward-pushing rhythms, though I often think the echoes are more Aboriginal than American (See the Buladelah Taree Holiday Song Cycle.) Murray pays close attention to details of the vernacular and local names. Animals, places and objects are invested with totemic power. Injustices are railed against as Murray aggressively defends the battlers he feels close to, and history's victims of tyranny. Like Judith Wright's Collected Poems this book stacks up to reveal a mighty lifetime's work.
I know this is supposed to be a sample of contemporary poetry, but I can't help including the names of a few of the recently deceased; somehow it feels like they are still with us. John Forbes is such a case and I think the best of our poets who might lay claim to the category of "post modern poetry" His Collected Poems (Brandl and Schlesinger) is a book full of irony, jokes, politics, pastiches of high and popular culture, put-downs and self-reference. Although he despised anything that smacked of the bardic, he was a bit of a playful rhymer himself. Forbes seems to me to be a deeply Australian poet. It's partly his use of Australian idiom, brand names and places, partly the determinedly larrikin sense of humour, always deflating the grandest subjects. He might drive you mad, then again you might love the stuff.
Jennifer Maiden has written 15 volumes of poetry, and one of my favourites among them isAcoustic Shadow (Penguin) which not only contains the powerful title sequence about media manipulation during the first Gulf War, but the irreverent verse dialogue Guarding the Cenotaph. I'd recommend it for this little gem alone.
The Language of Oysters (Craftsman House) is a large format hardback combining the poems of Robert Adamson and the black and white photographs of Juno Gemes. Adamson's metaphysical and at the same time gritty lyrics of the Hawkesbury River, its people, animals and places, are beautifully matched by Gemes's photographs which share the same qualities.
Peter Goldsworthy's New Selected Poems (Duffy and Snellgrove) demonstrates his range, from the comic to the very dark, from chemistry and numbers to sport, philosophy and music, including songs from his opera libretti, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and The Batavia.
A poet who is not so well known, but who deserves to be, is Patricia Irvine. Her debut collectionLeaving the Mickey (Wakefield Press) contains some brilliant parodies as well as highly entertaining poems about her religious education and some beautifully accurate nature writing.
'Working class poetry' has always had a strong place in our writing. Try Martin Johnson's Home Town Burial (Cornford Press), John West's All I ever wanted was a window ( Pardalote Press) or the terrific anthology by workers about their work 9-2-5 published by Collective Effort Press.
The poetry of migration and poets whose first language is not English is another important part of the contemporary scene. One of my favourite collections is New and Selected Poems by Dimitris Tsaloumas (UQP). His poetry is like a cup of good Greek Coffee, pungent and strong and slightly bitter. Also try Moon Over Melbourne by Ouyang Yu (Papyrus Publishing), Absence, New and Selected Poems by Antigone Kefala (Hale and Iremonger), and Fumigated by Ioana Petrescu (Ginninderra Press).
Some of our contemporary poets are especially good at bringing history to life - among them, John Millett's Last Draft (Five Islands Press) which is a verse drama for voices from World War Two, in particular the RAAF. Botany Bay Document (Black Pepper) by Jordie Albiston recreates the lives of the first white female settlers in this country with a unique style where the ballad collides with the documentary. See also Kembla Voices (Kemblawarra Press) by Conal Fitzpatrick, a poetic memorial to the victims of the Mt Kembla mining disaster of 1902.
Indigenous poetry is another rich seam in Australian contemporary writing. I recommend searching out the works of Jack Davis or Oodgeroo Noonuccal. Also Story About Feeling (Magabala Books) by Bill Neidje. Land Window (UQP) by John Graham is a beautiful and sensitive book of poetic language finely attuned to the land, and Ali Cobby Eckermann's 'Little Bit Long Time' (Picaro Press) provides a powerful emotional journey of reconnection to family.
Another way to acquaint yourself with the work of more contemporary Australian poets, especially if you'd like to discover some newer ones, is to dip into the Anthologies. I'd recommend New Music (Five Islands Press) edited by John Leonard and The Best Australian Poetry series (both the Black Inc and the UQP versions) These will give you a mixture of big names and less well-known ones, writing in different voices from a plethora of different backgrounds.