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- Contents Category: Poetry
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- Article Title: Things Which Threaten
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Frank Kellaway writes of the things which threaten the equilibrium of man, woman and people kind: napalm, gas chambers, pollution, lovers who go away, lovers who stay, motorcars and cruelty in general.
He can also write of things which have great beauty, but usually as a means of a contrast with the lesser works of the ape that stood up.
There is a poem to the Muse which seems to be obligatory in any collection. It is a rather incestuous habit of poets but one which Kellaway does not indulge to any serious degree. In fact a poem called ‘Moon Madness’ talks of the poet and his craft and is a rather beautiful poem full of some lavish images.
- Book 1 Title: Mare’s Nest
- Book 1 Biblio: Overland, 1978, $3.00, 47pp
His ability to evoke atmosphere is illustrated in the poem ‘Victoria Market’.
‘Twelve blood for two bob’
‘Last of the season
Riverland navels.’
Rhyme without reason.
‘Here cheap banana
Dozen for twenty.’
Suns heaped in plenty
bending the trestles.
The whole poem is an evocation of that hectic arena of pulped cabbage leaves, cheese and fish pungency and hanging clothes that might be new. But even in this poem there is a hint of violence in the chalk scrawled message.
‘Smiler won't pay’
we sense the knives
in the hidden day.
‘Foxie's Hangout’ is a poem about a place on the Mornington Peninsula where locals hang foxes and other caught things from a huge iron hoop. This particular hoop hanging from a tree at a crossroads is rather legendary on the Peninsula and all sorts of things have been hung from it. When I was a boy I remember riding my bike passed the tree and seeing a bra fluttering triumphantly. Men used to hang their trophies from that tree.
Kellaway takes a different stance from that of the locals and he compares the foxes hanging from the tree to the way in which the Koryaks used to hunt the fox for fur and
then revere their victim, cover his skinned body with grass and fill his stiffening jaws with roe. Aboriginals paint duck and kangaroo on cave walls and sing and dance songs of progenity for all their victims. We pick out pigs heads in glazed tiles beneath the butcher’s window and plaster our cars with bumper stickers, ‘eat more beef’, such are our primal instincts today. Kellaway puts it in this way
In comfortable days like these
the gentler ways of savages
seem just a quaint irrelevance
a childish dream of innocence.
This poet has control over words. Consider these lines from Ra’hel:
Around her eyes are wrinkles in the fresh skin
where the sly crows have trodden in their
humour
In a poem, ‘Remember’, he speaks to a lover who left him for a bitter fellow in a ‘smug house’ and he evokes a chilling image for her:
When my ghost will creep from your own
marrow bone
and lying in terror you will see
him kiss the girl you used to be.
There is much that is disturbing, much that is frightening and much which is beautiful in this volume and as such it seems to represent a fair assessment of life.
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