Joyflight By Cate Kennedy, Carindale: Interactive Publications, 2004, 64 pages, paperback, $23.00. Reviewed by Helen Hagemann in the June 2005 issue. Help more readers find out about this article
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Joyflight is Cate Kennedy's second collection following on from Signs of Other Fires published by Five Islands Press, 2001. This lyrical work touches on the personal, family biography, and Irish history. Kennedy's poems all share a concern for lived experience, and convey the social mores and fabric of rural life, whether at home or abroad, stylized or imagined. Her poems have a unique metaphysical quality, where landscapes offer different perspectives. Many poems convey the motif of flight, allowing the reader to go beyond rooms, the flat landscape, 'beyond gravity', to more interesting and lofty observations. What is joyful about these poems is that a reader's knowledge is extended when grave stones of history are revealed, when world powers are again Apollo-Soyuz linked, and New York's Metropolitan Museum is visited. Kennedy's exposé of a mock-up 'Authentic Irish Pub' is a blarney-styled satire on video-camera tourists, where even the driver can't wait 'to get the taste of them out of his mouth with a Guinness'. ('Irish Singing Here Every Friday Night')
Expansive is a word that comes to mind in these well-crafted, narrative poems in two parts. Part 1, 'That Pure Torn-Open Moment', observes personal moments and small events on the family farm. In 'Minotaur', Kennedy shares a precarious moment when the family has to contend with noisy bulls in the mating season: It takes dogs and a vehicle to separate them;
the old bull bruised and limping, enraged and abusive
forced back to his lonely paddock
his usurper -- younger, a weight advantage on top of his form
better at disguising his damage
calls back any time, old man
and shoulders his way back to prime position under a tree. Like the human world, animals, too, have their own frustrations. The old bull's exasperation, and comical engagement with the fence are vividly drawn: All day the old bull moans unspeakable injustice
reinstates his case
screams up and down the boundary
limping on his bleeding hoof
making a show of resenting the fence. The title poem 'Joy Flight' conveys a father's story. As the poet states, 'provoked from him/by some landslide of sorrow'. Through Kennedy's synchronicity and storytelling we are drawn into the event of three boys wanting to fly in 'that silver machine/ that sky'. The cover photograph reveals it was 1937, Yorktown, SA, where a Tiger Moth rests its tail in the long grass, a single-propeller engine nosed towards the fields, pointing skyward. As with many stories that look back through time, there are often pent-up secrets looking for their own catharsis. Kennedy handles the dichotomy of the boys' triumph over their father's disgruntled manner with sensitivity and skill. The re-telling of a boy's joyful experience and youthful defiance is worthy of admiration, allowing the reader to wonder about the highs and lows of a troubled moment. Beyond the literal there are deeper cultural meanings, family tension, fear, hard times, and a frivolous expense pinching a man's face and his pocket. The wider implications deal with the family's misery of poverty, the Depression years, aircraft that symbolise World War I, and young men dying in the sky. However, redemption comes within the poem when parents succumb to the wishes of 'boys taut with longing':Disaster could have struck, and sent my grandmother mad with grief.
My grandfather would have been condemned
to watch that, from the ground, forever.
But nothing went wrong.
They flew, and returned safely to the earth, transformed,
an awestruck moment in a poor childhood,
desire made real, a stern father hiding his smile on the home run. While this is a minor criticism, I felt the poem finished on Page 8 with the strong thematic line, 'astonished by joy and flight'. Had the poem ended before the last stanza it would have had more impact. Instead, a father's story segues into the narrator's own conscious desire to share further talismanic and hidden familial fictions/stories. I found myself formulating these words: 'Yes, but don't tell, show!' This could have been another poem, perhaps, still incorporating the first section's excellent line: 'That pure torn-open moment'.
Kennedy establishes an explicit link between poetry and the landscape. Her concrete images are inventive and fresh. In 'Wormwood', the land is epitomised for its harshness and failings: 'Nothing native ever finds a hold again/ bramble and gorse sprawl snarling over the clay/ glinting pale like a scar through hair'.
'Thinking The Room Empty' brings us face to face with outback Alice Springs, a harsh environment, and the possibilities of losing one's way: A friend, losing her way in the desert
walks out of a dry, Alice Springs riverbed into thirty thousand miles
of flat ruled horizon, blazing heat, waterless saltbush. This is an engaging poem, allowing readers into that private moment when we see a poet working at her best. Yet, this is someone else's dilemma and challenge: 'She is thirsty, and she trespasses/ climbs through the fence/ walks expecting rifle fire'. The poem works on various planes, both meditative and transcendental. Firstly, the skilled artificer transports us beyond the page, the room and airlifts us to a rooftop, where we 'catch sight/ of a low mountain range/ elevated over the line of the horizon/ the direction back to town'. The experience of being saved is felt, made universal.
The last two stanzas are rich with insight. Kennedy's inward observations go beyond the narrative, and are hauntingly philosophical: I wonder how many times I have broken some lock
searched hastily and withdrawn
thinking the room empty,
overlooked the disguised and waiting gift
missed the mountain.
I wonder what my stunted sightline
has failed to notice
what path home
I have abandoned. In 2002, Cate Kennedy won the Vincent Buckley Poetry Award making it possible for her to travel to Ireland. Part 2, 'Burning the World's Almanac', includes poems that were written during her sojourn, and is a dedication to Irish history and tradition. The poem 'Poor Commissioners' exposes the monstrous sufferance by a group of 150 famine victims in 1849 who were denied food and shelter at a poorhouse in County Mayo, Ireland. Kennedy's sympathetic narrative of the plight of these famine victims is dramatic and justified. We sense the bureaucracy of the times, and recognise the polarities of poverty and class. These visual effects of discomfort share a confluence of empathy, and the injustice of lives lost (ancestors, perhaps?): 'your father there, huddled, vanishing/ so that the snow at last/ a misjudged enemy/ invited you down to rest/ muffling each voice/ and a faint half-dreamed comfort'. The imagination works here to make a fragment of history durable and singular, but certainly it is only one of many, horrific Irish events of the past.
Readers will be well rewarded with this book of thirty-four poems. There's an intimacy and truth, imaginative transitory moments, old wounds re-told and healed. Lovers of narrative poems will discover Kennedy's precision with language, metaphor, irony and humour that are all strikingly pictorial. At times, the book requires several readings for its long line lengths, but in the re-reading images like: 'green blooms of translucent aphids/ unhurriedly drinking a rose to death', are memorable. Citation - Helen Hagemann. 'Review: Joyflight by Cate Kennedy' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 06 September 2010].
Back Cover Blurb - 'Kennedy's poetry inhabits a large world, both of geography and of humanity, in which her voice, imagery, angle and insights are personal and individual. Approachable, subtle and crafted, this work offers many different sorts of satisfaction'. Aileen Kelly
'These poems are driven by Kennedy's instinct for story,character, and place, but there's a moment when the poems 'suddenly open up, out of nowhere' and we find we're 'standing inside ourselves, in that pure, torn open moment'. Bronwyn Lea
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Issue 44
Popular Music: Practices, Formations and Change - Australian Perspectives
