The Literate Detective
by Paul Scully
ISBN: 9780645776881
Reviewed by SIMEON KRONENBERG
Paul Scully may be described, without irony, as an old-fashioned poet: one for whom the act of writing remains grounded in the aspiration to elevate verse through philosophical reflection, emotional depth, and a sustained attentiveness to language and its meanings. His poetry is animated by a clear faith in words—and their capacity to carry thought, feeling, and resonance beyond the merely instrumental. Such commitments might appear self-evident, even foundational to the poetic enterprise, yet they are not universally shared.
Much contemporary poetry has moved in other directions, often favouring a pared-back, often conversational idiom and an aversion to formal or rhetorical display. Against this backdrop, Scully’s work stands out for its willingness to engage openly with cadence, pattern, and the expressive possibilities of language. Rather than treating the “poetic” with suspicion, his poems affirm it as a necessary mode of attention—one that trusts in the shaping power of words and the forms they inhabit. In doing so, Scully reminds us that poetry need not relinquish its musical, philosophical, or even spiritual dimensions in order to remain fully of its time.
It is precisely here that Scully’s work reveals its contemporaneity. His poems are deeply alert to the unease of the present moment and to a pervasive sense of dislocation from the now. That he chooses to explore these conditions within the framework of modified traditional forms, and through a sustained love of language and its philosophical density, speaks to both his literary intelligence and his intellectual inheritance. The poems move fluidly between the textures of everyday experience and reflections that are at once philosophical and almost scientific in their rigour. Indeed, Scully’s fascination with scientific thought is evident throughout his work and finds explicit expression in his recent collection The Fickle Pendulum.
In Paul Scully gathers a sequence of poems that inhabit the life of a police officer, collected under the section that lends the book its title. At a moment when public consciousness seems increasingly unsettled by questions of crime, justice, and institutional authority, this imaginative dwelling within the figure of the detective feels uncannily apposite. The character who emerges is at first tentative, almost naïve, yet as the sequence unfolds, he grows into a hard-won comprehension of the world he serves — and the reader, moving alongside him, is drawn into the same slow accrual of understanding.
The opening poem, “The Detective’s Almanac”, establishes the tonal register for what follows. The fledgling professional dismisses the familiar paraphernalia of fictional detection — ‘trench coat, fedora, deerstalker, priestly vestments, nuns’ habits’ — as so many ‘tropical tropes’, theatrical ‘accoutrements’ inherited from television melodrama. In their place comes a recognition of the dense moral matter of actual detective work, an acceptance that death ‘is labile and numerous’, that ‘harm and hurt a chasm (and) theft a cloying absence — and guilt eternal …’. From the outset, Scully signals that this will be less an exploration of crime than of the moral atmosphere in which crime is encountered.
For the detective, as for all of us, there appears to be safety in the well-worn path of conformity to social expectation. Yet these poems steadily erode any sense that such a path offers clarity or refuge. The detective’s growing comprehension of his world is shadowed by a corresponding emotional calcification; what he gains in knowledge he risks losing in humanity. The sequence asks, with quiet insistence, whether such knowledge is itself a form of diminishment, and whether the cost of professional insight is a gradual estrangement from ordinary feeling.
In ‘Down by Lane Cove River, 1963’, included in the final subsection ‘Scrapbook’, Scully draws this meditation out of abstraction and into the unsettling terrain of lived history. A notorious case is reanimated in all its lurid, baffling horror — an episode that transfixed and titillated 1960s Australia in equal measure. I recall, at seventeen, the sensational headlines surrounding the Chandler–Bogle case, rendered all the more prurient by insinuations of adulterous ‘swing-door’ marriages and the tawdry spectacle of desire played out on the banks of what Scully memorably describes as a ‘spent condom of a river’. The metaphor is as arresting as it is unsettling, condensing into a single image the era’s fascination with sexual transgression and moral decay.
Here too, the “stern detectives” of the poem find themselves confronted not with clarity but with bafflement. The facts resist arrangement; the case offers no satisfying narrative resolution. In this failure of method lies the deeper resonance of the sequence: the recognition that the world the detective seeks to master is finally resistant to comprehension, and that the limits of reason are as much a part of his vocation as its procedures.
The sequence of detective poems in The Literate Detective derives its power from the way each poem inhabits a world thick with mystery, compromise, ambiguity, and the proximity of evil. These are poems that both allure and unsettle; they trouble the reader even as they draw us in. For this reason, they function as potent ciphers for our own unsettled times.
In the more personal sequence, ‘Mind Stunts’, Scully turns from the external world of crime and procedure to the interior theatre of consciousness itself. Here the poems move with a lighter, more musical touch, though they remain alert to the shifting dominance of perception and thought. The titles of the six short poems signal this preoccupation with mental states and altered awareness: Foreboding, Premonition, Déjà vu, Mirage, Hallucination, On Waking from a Dream.
‘Mirage’ in particular stands out:
Distance on the bitumen is rectangles
of shifting sameness, a javelin runway
west, acid-harsh gibber and ochre
to the north, a pocket of remotest blue,
yet lakes somehow lather the vista,
lapping makeshift foothills
and a pool-shimmer on the road
far ahead. I am a thirsty fool.
This single-stanza poem gathers its images with deceptive simplicity. On the surface, we are presented with the ordinary visual phenomena of distance and heat on an Australian road. Familiar enough you might think, even cliché. Yet the final line, sudden and declarative — ‘I am a thirsty fool’ — transforms the descriptions into acts of self-recognition. The mirage is no longer merely optical but psychological, even existential. The speaker’s admission anchors the poem’s imagery while enlarging it, drawing the reader into that acute moment when perception turns inward and we become ‘aware’ of our own awareness. It is precisely here that Scully’s poetry achieves its quiet force. What begins as observation becomes illumination: a moment of heightened cognisance in which the external world and the inner life meet.
And even more obviously personal are a pair of poems within the broader section titled, Clusters. The poems “Hiding in the Daylight” and “Ours is not a through street … “ are paired in a sub section titled, ‘Home Fires’, where the exigencies of suburban beauty are unfolded carefully, like something unwrapped, with care – as if to save the paper.
“Hiding in the Daylight”, is an observation poem, one where the speaker, sitting “on our deck”, records his observations of the neighbourhood of birds, people and cars in a loving portrait of suburban life. Here, the “rinse water grey” is “finally dispelled” and “the sky now gleams”, initiating a peaceful moment of reflection until the dog “erupts” into “a crescendo / of barking”, thus disturbing both the speaker and the “grey crane cresting the fence line”. The poem continues its deep interest in bird life, as do many Australia poems, noting the “king parrot sifting the offerings in Julie’s lorikeet / feeding tray, the cock bird skulking in the magnolia, and a kookaburra / and its rumbustious comedy atop a paling …” And there are more, somewhat darker presences as well, including the “pigeons that have dispelled the fairy wrens”. This, a reminder that this urban peace being observed, within which the speaker luxuriates behind “a newspaper, ipad and coffee hide” has been wrangled from the bush at inevitable cost to native wild life, which hangs on.
The poem ends in the recognition that within this “vigil for the impaling moment” where ultimately, we discover “infinity in a millisecond”, there is an acute awareness of the fleeting moment of consciousness, be it ever so fugitive.
In the wryly titled “Ours is not a through street …” there is another portrait of suburban life and its context, describing two ageing people who must confront, or resist perhaps, the exigencies laid out as the likely future for them, when they can no longer manage their suburban paradise but be forced to shift to “downsizer-appropriate tenements”.
There is a new generation inhabiting the street, including a “scamp” who “bellows from the driveway opposite” then “galoots away on his tricycle, grin wide as an open plain” and who has a father who “mows and coaxes couch and buffalo into ordered growth…” These are recent neighbours, friendly ones, but they replace the old, like Wal, “the previous owner, in a nursing home, “as is Gwen next door…” It seems like that fate might be just up ahead for the speaker and his Julie too – but there is resistance, thankfully, where despite the “shrinking” and the forgetting, there remains a memorial in suburban “fence lines” where heroism is measured in terms of “constancy (and) care”, just keeping on.
In The Literate Detective, Paul Scully demonstrates that poetry can remain intellectually ambitious, formally attentive, and emotionally resonant without retreating into sentimentality (he remains too much the scientist for that) or irrelevance. Across its varied sequences, the collection affirms a sustained belief in language as a medium capable of holding moral complexity, perceptual subtlety, and philosophical weight. Scully’s work does not shy away from difficulty—whether ethical, emotional, or epistemological—but instead dwells patiently within it, allowing meaning to emerge through accumulation and sometimes momentary revelation.
The detective poems, which form the conceptual focus of the collection, The Literate Detective, function less as narratives of crime than as meditations on knowledge, responsibility, and moral exposure. The detective’s growing understanding of the world does not bring mastery or resolution; rather, it produces estrangement, ambiguity, and a heightened awareness of the limits of reason. In this sense, the figure of the detective becomes emblematic of the contemporary subject: professionally competent, ethically burdened, and perpetually confronting the insufficiency of explanatory frameworks. Scully’s refusal of narrative closure is not a failure of method but an ethical stance, acknowledging a world resistant to coherence.
This attentiveness to the fragile nature of understanding carries through to the more personal and domestic poems. In Mind Stunts and Clusters, perception itself becomes the site of inquiry. Moments of mirage, memory, suburban observation, and ageing are rendered with precision and restraint, yet they open onto larger questions of consciousness, temporality, and care. The suburban poems, in particular, resist sentimentality, holding beauty and loss, continuity and erosion, within the same frame. Heroism, here, is not spectacular but grounded in endurance, attention, and relational fidelity.
Taken as a whole, The Literate Detective offers a compelling argument for poetry as a mode of sustained thought—one that neither abandons the musical and philosophical traditions of the lyric nor retreats from the unsettled realities of the present. Scully’s achievement lies in his capacity to make uncertainty productive, transforming ambiguity into a space of ethical and perceptual engagement. These poems do not resolve the world; they teach us how to remain alert within it.
SIMEON KRONENBERG has published poetry, reviews, interviews and essays in Australian poetry journals and anthologies, including Best Australian Poems, 2017. In 2014 he won the Second Bite Poetry Prize and in 2015 was short-listed for the Newcastle Poetry Prize. Distance, his most recent poetry collection still black water is published by Pitt Street Poetry.