For many years, David Malouf has dwelt with fascination on the startlingly achronological properties of memory - or at least of his memory: the way in which experiences from the past often enter into full awareness, sometimes for the first time, long after the fact. His most recent anthology, Revolving Days, inscribes this distinctively Maloufian temporality into the very structure of the collection, with interesting results. As he explains in a short Author's Note, 'the poems ... appear at the point where they were touched off by something seen or felt rather than the time, sometimes years later, when I found words for the experience'. The formulation is a little cryptic. What it means, in practice, is that each of the four sections of the collection contains poems reflecting events and experiences of the same period in the poet's life: childhood and youth in Brisbane during and after World War II; teaching and travelling in England and Europe in the 1960s; life in Sydney in the 1970s; and the subsequent two decades of shuttling annually between Sydney and Tuscany. This apparently simple chronological sequence, however, is deceptive, because in each of these sections we encounter elements of Malouf's poetic sensibility dating from anywhere across the 45-year range from his earliest published volume of poems (1962) to the present day.