{"id":263,"date":"2014-03-05T23:06:07","date_gmt":"2014-03-05T23:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/?p=263"},"modified":"2014-03-05T23:33:05","modified_gmt":"2014-03-05T23:33:05","slug":"the-passion-paintings-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/?p=263","title":{"rendered":"The Passion Paintings: Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

From David Gilbey,\u00a0Australian Book Review<\/em>, April 2007:<\/p>\n

\u2018The Passion Paintings<\/em>\u00a0collects a writing life of poetry: some seventy pages of new poems, \u201cBook Three\u201d, grafted onto Kelly\u2019s Mary Gilmore Award-winning first volume\u00a0Coming Up For Light<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0City and Stranger<\/em>. It is a rich feast of concentrated flavours and conceptual challenges \u2013 a book with multiple layers of satisfaction . . . using crafty language to focus on relationships and meaningfulness. . . . The book is itself a brilliant triptych . . . the individual poems focusing on moments, conversations, and individuals whose lives and imaginings instantiate the intersection between secular and sacred in the contemporary world.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From Catherine Phil MacCarthy,\u00a0Poetry Ireland<\/em>\u00a0Review<\/em>, Issue 91:<\/p>\n

\u2018Kelly\u2019s work increasingly reflects formal and informal verse shapes, and a high degree of experimentation with words, phrases and metre . . . Relationships, and connection or the absence of it, are a strong thematic preoccupation. Her investigation of women\u2019s experience in her first book becomes increasingly in her second and third a passionate divagation on human existence . . . Another strand of her work probes the connection between language and life: \u2018She\u2019s camped well out in the subjunctives\u2019 (\u2018Mood\/ Tense\u2019), or \u2018Writer and reader shuffle masks \/ to act a three-door bedroom farce \/ set in each other\u2019s mind\u2019 (\u2018Personal grammar\u2019). The sense of voice as physical and of the body as word is a central preoccupation from the beginning and an inherent source of playfulness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Many of these poems are talky, quick-witted, passionate . . . [In \u2018Cross country\u2019] the juxtaposition of body with city and graffiti reflects Kelly\u2019s obsession with both the space around her and language. Many of the poems here and later display her confidence in probing the connection between the body and the physical world we inhabit, and in the process evoke the textures of daily living . . . Kelly plays with perspective, and the outcome is a series of surreal images, strangely haunting . . .[In the title poem] the process of making is there from beginning to end, as well as the making of process . . . It is difficult to do justice to a collection whose virtuosity and scope is as ambitious and luminous as Kelly\u2019s is.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From Jen Webb, Review essay:\u00a0Poetry in Australia and the John Leonard Press<\/em>,\u00a0http:\/\/www.textjournal.com.au\/oct08\/webb.htm<\/a>, 2008:<\/p>\n

\u2018Many of her pieces are as much story as poem, often the stories of a poetic persona with grown children and elderly, dying parents, who is facing the world in a now-aging woman\u2019s body, and trying to deal with life. In \u2018All down darkness\u2019 she opens the poem with the brave assertion:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

Darkness rises and I strike it down
\nRises and I strike it
\ndown<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and of course, keeps striking \u2013 this is a battle none of us will win.
\nIt confronts and reflects the small moments of an everyday life: nephews and nieces growing into adulthood, graffiti on a train, a spider weaving her web. There are wonderfully mirth-filled lines (read \u2018My brother\u2019s piano\u2019, about Freud and his sister), along with poems that commemorate suffering and loss, domestic activity, familial encounters. All these poems seem to me to say \u2018Pay attention!\u2019 The middle section especially is sharp and often bitter, the rhythm tapped out, spat out, as in \u2018This far\u2019:<\/p>\n

Hope is a change of ocean\u2019s mind.
\nYou find a place to head for sideways
\nif arm and leg still chord in to the spine:
\na place where water creeps on an alien beach
\nthe dune-grass peppered with unknown blossoms
\nyou fall upon and count your cells like sand.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From David Gilbey,\u00a0Australian Book Review, April 2007: \u2018The Passion Paintings\u00a0collects a writing life of poetry: some seventy pages of new poems, \u201cBook Three\u201d, grafted onto Kelly\u2019s Mary Gilmore Award-winning first volume\u00a0Coming Up For Light,\u00a0and\u00a0City and Stranger. It is a rich feast of concentrated flavours and conceptual challenges \u2013 a book with multiple layers of satisfaction […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=263"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":264,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions\/264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}