The Passion Paintings collects a writing life of poetry: some seventy pages of new poems, Book Three, grafted onto fifty pages of Kelly’s Mary Gilmore Award-winning first volume, Coming up for Light (1994), and eighty pages from City and Stranger (2002). It is a rich feast of concentrated flavours and conceptual challenges – a book with multiple layers of satisfaction.

Although the two earlier volumes have been praised and reviewed elsewhere, let me commend, first, from Coming up for Light, the fine ‘Looking for Andy’ (police turning rooms upside down searching for an alleged drug dealer), which is often collected by my students in their anthology assignment. There is also the windhovering ‘Inheritance’, which opens the volume with speculative, evolutionary whirls, as it celebrates and questions the sensual mastery of womanhood. ‘Night in Orbit’ sees the universe and writing from her dog’s eyes: ‘a dream of something faintly barkable.’ Hinting at the book’s preoccupation with revisioning Christian mythology is ‘Wonders Will Never Cease’, which looks at the significance of the body’s experience of ‘that unbelievable moment the first nail’s / pain captures a wrist’.

City and Stranger explores ‘how to be estranged from a whole city’, using crafty language to focus on relationships and meaningfulness. ‘Her Likeness’ for example is a tightly structured poem in which ‘captured’, ‘birdcall’ and ‘vines of air’ in the first part are repeated in the second part in reverse order, making wrappers of pungent meaning – natural, sacred and writerly around the core image of an illuminated death. That the poem ends with ‘unframed’ is a clever point about the lack of spiritual consolation for mothers.

Individuality and ageing are also modes of alienation, as a daughter riffles through her mother’s things: ‘as into dangerous garbage without rubber gloves … / … And three single condoms / from godknowswhere for godknowswhen. Or who’ (‘The Door Shut’). The increasing degradation of human intercourse is suggested in a disturbing poem near the end of this section, ‘From the Heat’.

Book Three announces a turning, told as a quest or pilgrimage, suggested in a phrase in the opening poem, ‘Being Private in Public’: ‘to arrive at a stunned stillness.’ There is a sense of settling for an epiphanic ‘new symmetry’ which, in my reading of the poems, becomes uncertain, despite a new immanence, and is ultimately lost. This is partly because there are so many (terrific) poems about the ageing body, but mostly because, although there is a powerful reaffirmation and reinterpretation of incarnation, the poems stay firmly grounded in human and social reality.

In ‘Incarnation’, Kelly proposes ‘God sideways / slides into the secular’, both ‘shyly’ and ‘confidently’. In ‘Emmaus Vic 3130’, a real presence is palpable: ‘and the scab from Friday’s wound is, / surprisingly, blood. As if I expected ichor. / So maybe I’ll see you around?’ On the one hand, the poems assert a substantial revelation; on the other, these fine poems (and I don’t wish to imply that these are less than very good poems) point to the way language, in an inevitable postmodernism, prevaricates, nuances. In ‘Mood/Tense’, for example, we read ‘She’s camped well out in the subjunctives’, wryly reminding us of the hypothetical nature of experience. In ‘Personal Grammar’, Kelly cleverly frames the traditional ‘dream lover’ of Austen, Brontë and Du Maurier between a division of subject and object (love versus sex; female versus male) so that ‘the personal and the personae coalesce / … / snapped into the locket / of deceptive pronouns’. There is, in Book Three, a strong sense of bodily, grounded nature, which depends for its significance on point of view (see ‘Silage’). The three powerful short stanzas of ‘Platform 3’ balance different perceptions of a man and a woman embracing before she boards a train. The heroic and romantic possibilities of the first two stanzas are dismissed in the final lines as ‘we saw / the world drop from his fingers / to swirl and flop between the rails / among the wake of litter’.

Book Three ends the collection, after a series of tart epigrams, with the ironic, modified villanelle ‘Not Alarmed’, which juggles the problems of politics, capitalism and war via a reinterpretation of nursery fables. It ends: ‘The sky is falling but our roof’s quite sound. / The news cuts out and the K-Marts close. / We shut our curtains as the wind swings round. / We sit at attention and the house falls down.’

The Passion Paintings forcefully and playfully reminds us of at least three of the meanings of ‘passion’: the intensity of human emotion and thought; the suffering of Christ during his last days; and the painterly and literary exploration of these two ‘passions’. The book is itself a brilliant triptych, its three panels the different collections of Kelly’s poetry, the individual poems focusing on moments, conversations, and individuals whose lives and imaginings instantiate the intersection between secular and sacred in the contemporary world.