by Cath Kenneally (Salt Publishing). Review / Peter Goldsworthy

I DON’T know how John Kinsella’s Salt Publishing does it but he has done it again. Cath Kenneally’s All Day, All Night is another beautifully produced book of poetry. Mostly Kenneally writes in a relaxed vernacular, relying on an accumulation of impressions, often visual, and often of a particularly domestic slant – the kind of thing Frank O’Hara might have written, if he had kids.

Her partner Ken Bolton’s influence in this is acknowledged, and gently parodied:
I get up and read
some Jim Schuyler
a Ken thing to do… (morning poem)

But just when you think this might be getting too chatty, Kenneally stabs you in the heart:
one day, she’ll evaporate like woodland mist
weightless and unresolved, unified and true
leaving us thrashing in our ephemera (Sister Wendy)

That’s very much the Kenneally thing to do. My favourite Kenneally poems – Be Where, Now?, IC, All Day, All Night,
Victoria’s Secret, or the lovely elegy for John Forbes – have a high stab ratio per stanza, especially those that revolve around the death of her father. And in possibly the best poem in the collection – View from the Pier – she confounds any superficial notion of her chattiness, and provides a compelling manifesto for, or defence of, what she is up to. Musing on how well men tell stories, she writes:
hands to the wheel / eyes on the main
narrative drag / or metaphysical drift
… The boys stand on their / separate piers, astrolabes
and compasses at hand / mapping their trajectories …
… girls tell shreds of tales / only ask for bits
‘… how’s your Mum? Since the / doctor’s news?’

Perhaps I especially like this poem because it hangs on the narrative drag of a straight argument, and in that sense subverts both itself, and the boy in me. The poem seems hard-earnt by Kenneally but her lightness of touch in this book might provide a welcome relief from all the ponderous Mythic Reinventions of Australian Identity written by boy novelists in recent years.