Australian. Most of the poems are more than a page long (the few short ones like "Binaries" don't work). "8 x 10 colour enlargements $16.50" is over 2 pages long - mostly info-dumping with a final flourish of rhetorical repetition. "The Poor Commissioners" (3 pages) begins with a paragraph of history. Amongst the 3 pages are "And so these hundred and fifty, unnamed,/ condemned to white oblivion by a flat refusal,/ one stone, now, suffices for them all" (p.32) and "This is Delphi of the silenced, unrecognisable stones,/ where witness is a frozen and thawed and refrozen thing,/ Delphi, where the oracle speaks, and we do not listen" (p.33).
The text frequently reads like heightened prose - "A front beach contains no shelter, and no mercy. We swam buffeted between narrow, snapping flags, thrashing to stay on our feet ... those flags red rags to you" (p.43). "Requeening" spreads an idea too thinly. "October 14th, 2010: the Chilean miners are lifeted into light" is prose with line-breaks.
"Eating Earth" succeeds, though that too has imagery I've read before - " All night/ a saline drip ticks like a clock into my hand/ tear by tear" (p.39). I like "Like a storm", but not the succeeding poem, "Thankyou". Phrase like "grief is work ... a snarled, exhausting thing we need to do" (p.45) could work given more support.
Moments of change are experienced by people who can't always express what's changed - "mute with the miracle of comprehension" (p.26). In "Colostrum" an abandoned calf starts to suckle - "and I could hold this still moment forever" (p.53)
Near the start of "Breath" there's "every morning there's a pager test,/ and the warning siren/ sounds a sombre all-clear.// Each man in the crew, on tenterhooks" (p.50) The point of the poem is stated twice in the penultimate stanza - "But in the face of such radiant heat/ we may have a change of heart/ about what is suddenly essential;/ perhaps in those seconds/ of fighting for breath/ we see at last what we would die without/ in the aftermath still to be borne" (p.51).
Other reviews
- Goodreads
- Ali Alizadeh (Kennedy has an exceptional skill for embedding the elements of narrative (most effectively, in her case, plot and linear structure, as well as techniques such as the historical present) in writing about a range of subjects in her poetry. ... The poems’ naturalist, mimetic style, whilst perhaps suitable for telling a prose story, falls short of rising above conventional, at times predictable, phrases and constructions. It is a source of disappointment that many carefully plotted and genuinely sincere poems (many of them clearly based on the poet’s personal experiences) suffer from a lack of attention to the meaning and formation of individual lines and sentences. ... While one does not doubt Kennedy’s skills as ‘a born storyteller’, one cannot help but wonder about the level of workshopping and editing that may have gone into The Taste of River Water)
- Luke Beesley
No comments:
Post a Comment