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Andy Kissane’s fourth collection, Radiance, is a heartening answer to those who, like publisher Stephen Matthews, lament that ‘many modern poets choose to shroud their work in point-scoring obscurity at a time when clarity and accessibility might encourage more people to read poetry’. Kissane doesn’t address this issue directly, but his book is an important negative instance.
- Book 1 Title: Radiance
- Book 1 Biblio: Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 78 pp
What helps to make these poems even more memorable is the way the book’s remaining sections display, by contrast, a complementary and characteristically playful imagination. Part II, for instance, features dreamlike encounters with John Keats and Percy Shelley. Dylan Thomas and Virginia Woolf are given similar treatment. All the poems suggest much about each writer’s work and personality.
In Part III, politics returns – with sometimes heartbreaking strength – as in ‘My Husband’s Grave’ and ‘Against Forgetting’, both of which deal with extreme political courage. Again, these poems are surrounded with lighter, more personal, even nostalgic ones.
Similarly, in the book’s final section, ‘The Sea of Tranquillity’, Kissane adopts the ancient technique of personifying the moon to ludic and lyrical extremes – yet stops well short of the sentimental.
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