These new poems from Simon West centre, for the most part, on landscape: the actual, the figurative, the local, the European. With a sure feeling for place (especially forest), The Yellow Gum's Conversion brings together observation and emotional weather, using language that is direct but also characterized by knowing omissions and, in the words of one poem, "trails built in the mind". Simon West is a poet with a rare symbolic imagination and a sense of phrasing all of his own.