Fremantle Press, $27.95.

Dennis Haskell's eighth poetry collection Ahead of Us is a tender chronicle of illness and bereavement. The heart of the book is its second section, That Other Country, a series of 23 poems about his wife Rhonda's long battle with ovarian cancer, her death, and his adjustment to life without her. All royalties from the book are to be donated to the Cancer Council of Western Australia for cancer research.

That Other Country is, as the title poem tells us, the home of those who have a terminal illness. Here there is "no day to day distraction/from the dictatorship of death" and "the economy/ is measured out in medicines and pain". "No use to declare/stark ignorance of the language./He says the word, 'cancer',/and already you are there."

This is not an easy book to read if cancer has touched you. In wrenching poems like After Chemo, and Who or Why or How or What Haskell focuses on the decay of Rhonda's body, while Drinking and Six Years speak to his long, hard slog as her primary carer. The imagery is drawn directly from these difficult things: in Plato's Error, "Cabbage moths white/like torn pieces of skin" are juxtaposed with a description of Rhonda's own skin, which "slumps on/the mannequin framework of [her] bones". The two ideas unite at the poem's end with "…skin/fluttering, peeling its way/out of our lives."

This section of the book reaches its climax in the long, harrowing sequence Saturday Night and Sunday Morning which narrates Rhonda's last hours. Haskell's focus on telling detail is heartbreaking here as, still in the room with her after she has died, he notices the sheet stirring, and realises "…the air conditioning/was breathing as if it were you".

Some of the book's most powerful poems actually deal with the aftermath of Rhonda's death. Haskell has written beautifully about grief before - in Locking the Garage Door, his elegy sequence for his father (from 1993's Abracadabra) and Temperatures on the same subject (from 2006's All the Time in the World). This time the loss is even closer to home. In Grief Haskell deploys deft rhyme, adopting a wry, slightly bitter perspective:

"Death shall have no dominion

one poet wrote,

and another

Death, thou shalt not die

Grief will tell you

one was a joke

and the other a lie".

Haskell switches between describing the grim reality of rituals like cremation (Ashes and Hair), and casting a longing eye back over their relationship. In 64a Princedale Rd he mulls over a photograph of Rhonda from their London days (reproduced on the cover), "the future piling up/in [her] pretty smile", and visits the same address alone in the present day, unable to "…credit/that it has all gone,/is sealed over …/…in all time's mystery/and menace…".

In Widower, Haskell maps his adjustment to his new status (or lack of it) by considering the sound of the word that now describes him: "…such an odd word/like something to do with threshing/or soaring: I caught this morning/morning's widower, stumbling down/wasted streets…".

The other main section in Ahead of Us is Chance, comprising 27 poems, just under half of which have appeared in earlier books. Here Haskell has taken the opportunity to collect key poems with a bearing on his relationship with Rhonda, their sons, and themes of death and luck – giving some sense of what, by the end of the book, is lost. These include No-one Ever Found You ("our days will be filled with green/and we will grow together like grass"), The Call, with its sestina-like repeated vocabulary ("silence – sleep – voice – call – breeze – nothing – bush – need") sustaining a beautiful dreamlike meditation on parental love, and the elegy An Act of Defiance ("[a]lready his presence / is falling out of us/ like dust").

Some of these poems also set up ideas which return in the cancer poems. The Trees, ostensibly an account of travel in France, unfolds images of mortality and impermanence which speak to the citizens of That Other Country: "…the light/does not seem ours by right/but only borrowed…Near clouds clot the air and early/darkness is closing in like fear".

Having dwelt for much of the book on the end of life, Haskell ends with a poem about its beginning (Fascination), for his five-month-old grandson. Here Haskell strikes a tender yet sombre note, illuminating the full depth of their connection, while at the same time implying its end: "you curl into me/like a koala bear/into a tree/as if every leaf/were a sap-filled wonder,/as if I could/stand there forever".

Melinda Smith is The Canberra Times poetry editor.