When I was younger and perhaps more arrogant, I could speak confidently of modern poetry and its defects. My listeners rightly pointed out that I hadn’t read many ‘modern poets’ and was in no position to pontificate. Underlying that exchange — and any discussion of poetry, even one grounded in ignorance — are the deeper and not fully answerable questions of what poetry is and why so many human beings write it. The answers to that question will be many, but common to most is the conviction that through poetry and other forms of art we seek to represent something more, something deeper, something longed for, in our world than we can reach through more discursive or analytical forms of writing. That ‘something more’ may be envisaged as lying beyond the world of our experience, lying within it, or refined from it.
Three recent collections of poems represent these different locations of poetry, shaped by three different stages of life and career. John Kelly and Warwick McFadyen, both towards the tail end of their professional journeys as teacher and journalist respectively, bring a reflective depth. In contrast, Isabella Mead has worked in publishing, has two young children and offers a perspective shaped by both career and motherhood. In discussing their books, I shall confine myself to the wellsprings of their poetry, omitting its many other virtues.
John Kelly, Essentially Unfinished, Poems 1964-2024, Grace Avenue Publications
In Essentially Unfinished John Kelly chooses poems he has written over sixty years, including those on his memories of boyhood in Adelaide, on visiting his ancestral Ireland, on religious themes, and on his experience as a teacher. Some of these poems, particularly those critical of culturally thin and condescending approaches to teaching English literature and of the broader culture that breeds them, are polemical. Most poets, I imagine, would agree with him in disapproving the attitudes and behaviour that he condemns. However, whether these attitudes are widespread, representative of contemporary culture, or merely crude responses to genuine needs might be disputed. Whatever of that, the poems reflect Kelly’s own concern for an education that draws on the riches of the literary tradition in involving students in a rich discussion of human values.
Kelly’s poems are closely observed, sensate, and their voice is conversational. His memories of his childhood, in particular, are notable for their precise and evocative description. ‘My father’s shed’, for example, displays the close attention, generosity of feeling,