- The Feeling of Bigness: Encountering Georgia O'Keefe. By Helen Parsons . Wakefield Press. pp 55. $19.95
- The Southern Oscillation Index. By Cath Kenneally. Wakefield Press. pp 59. $19.95
For more than 30 years now, Adelaide's Wakefield Press, has been the sort of publisher any city outside the Melbourne/Sydney axis could want - mostly local in source and national in reach (with a soft spot for poetry).
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The Feeling of Bigness by Helen Parsons and The Southern Oscillation Index by Cath Kenneally are typical of their strong poetry list.
The Feeling of Bigness is the more unusual, a kind of mini-verse biography of the important modernist American painter, Georgia O' Keefe (1887-1986). Like quite a few biographies these days, The Feeling of Bigness also integrates something of the biographer's own life into the text.
This risks self-aggrandisement but in the quiet, well-turned sequence of Parson's 35 sparsely-rhymed sonnets, there is an unexpectedly strong sense of a rather strange ambition being fully achieved.
The poems are sometimes based on famous paintings by O'Keefe, but are more often about key periods and relationships of her life, including the crucial one with the photographer, Alfred Stieglitz.
Like quite a few of O'Keefe's paintings, Parson's poems resonate with the landscape and weather of the American south-west.
At the beginning of "Dissolution" (about one of Stieglitz's famous photographs of O'Keefe) we note a recurrent Parsons mood: "This may be the one I love most. / No artifice, no poses, just her face, / shadowed and softened, looking out at us. / No, not at us, at him. I know that look. / She's been dissolved by love and making love, / made simple, opened up by intimacy."
Cath Kenneally's The Southern Oscillation Index is more "mainstream" than The Feeling of Bigness, despite the individuality of the poet's voice.
In some ways Kenneally's is a development of the William Carlos Williams aesthetic, with its belief in the endless possibilities of the quotidian for poetic use.
The poems are set mainly in Adelaide, with a few in Tasmania and many in London, seemingly a few decades ago.
The tone is generally conversational, sardonic, often humorous, and marked with a distinctively light touch.
The last two lines of "Hereabouts Haiku" are typical: "walking frame alongside high chair / outside op-shop: a concrete poem".
In "These Boots", Keneally characteristically imagines an "ex-Catholic" writers festival where participants would "trade stories , alcoholic fathers, martyred mothers /... read Gerard Manley Hopkins to each other in our cups / sing in the early hours, those favourite hymns we still use to put /ourselves to sleep."
As these snippets suggest, there is much to enjoy here.
- Geoff Page is a Canberra poet.
