- Free Article: No
- Contents Category: Poetry
- Review Article: Yes
- Online Only: No
- Custom Highlight Text:
Kin, Anne Elvey’s first full collection of poetry, brings together a wide range of poems full of light and the acuity of close attention. These poems focus on a world of inter-relationships where tree and water, creature and human, air and breathing, coexist – suggestive of an underlying philo-sophy of humility and acceptance. This is a world which envisions at least the potential of balance and a non-hierarchical sharing, where self and other, the natural world, and the devices and desires of the human might recognise each other.
- Book 1 Title: Kin
- Book 1 Biblio: Five Islands Press, $25 pb, 71 pp
In the delicate depths that characterise Elvey’s poetic canvas, the precision of her language evokes the suggestive richness of liminal spaces – of beaches, river banks, the moment when a bird launches into flight, or when a last breath leaves a body.
Drawing on a tradition of focused looking, particularly a studying of the natural world, Elvey’s poetry takes its place among lyrical practitioners such as Judith Wright, Gwen Harwood, Mary Oliver, Robert Adamson, and Mark Tredinnick. To see the world, paying reverent attention to its specificities, its manifest difference to the house of the self, is also, Elvey suggests, to find a kind of ecstatic awareness, a gateway to the extra-natural that can only be found through profound contemplation of the natural. She notes, ‘A soul quivers / in the palm of your / voice … A soul / pauses to witness / a magpie … the soul is a prayer / may a great / white egret / lance your skies.’
From all this witnessing of the world comes the creating impulse of the poem; insistent and determined, everyday and extraordinary, Elvey brings us poetry as ‘a thing that shapes itself / to a tongue, as elusive / as the blowfly / that got in yesterday / buzzes now, and will not / be chased out’.
Comments powered by CComment