Why did Yeats write
Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer
long
Whatever is begotten, born and dies.
and not ‘Fish, flesh, and fowl’? I imagine because ‘or’ is better rhythmically. Aileen Kelly has this kind of ear:
stubborn, meticulous, inventive.
In the freshening pond pobblebonks yell
for the brief
comfort of procreation, the myth of
escape.
Strength and poignancy are hurried into that little preposition: ‘for’ in exuberance, and out of need. Her poem ‘Notes from the planet’s edge’ might have given Kelly’s magnificent second book an alternative title: it is testimony to its brave humanism that City and Stranger is a truer name.
Not that ‘City’ is ever-present. In the cover picture and matching sequence ‘After Drysdale’, the city is an absence, or an emblem of displacement. Against the desert is the human figure, ‘lump of enduring female’. Somewhere in that lump, a distorting memory is held, as ‘sad shoes’ or ‘gigantic handbag’. The city is lost, but the stranger is the very embodiment of the human. You don’t need a city to be alone, only dislocation and some kind of memory.
A city will do it. The title poem wryly celebrates a random occupation by the unknown, ‘a short-rent flat’ in the kind of city across the world that Kelly’s ancestors once left. This poem maps a psychic space before the poetry comes. In that preliminary idleness, ‘you’re never truly alone’. Alone comes later:
you’re reading
with a postcard from the familiar to book- mark where you think you can return.
You can return, but you bring with you what you have left behind. It won’t leave you alone, and it won’t quite leave you ‘Partnered, settled, childed’. You are always in two places and absent from two places, inhabited by conflict, strange to yourself.
‘The whirlpool’ takes this preoccupation up directly (‘an arrow labelled You / Are Not Here.’) ‘First lesson’ involves a collision of different life forms in one space, when a curious child tries to ingest experience:
the ice … worked / its way down longer … a strange / relish of roosting starlings ... /... all their dropping-germs / frozen alive woke in my belly ...’. Primal instincts collide, the lodestone can work backwards. You switch on the TV and ‘the city is burning’ but you don’t know which city. ‘For us / it was bombs’.
Distinctions collapse like buildings. The city may be a metaphor for the sane mind: ‘my city humming with