Pathos laced with anger

Abstract

Pathos laced with anger James Roderick Burns Sacredly Profane Kevin Densley. Port Adelaide: Ginninderra Press, 2020. 68 pp. A$20.00. ISBN 978-1-76109-032-5 Everything you would expect in a Kevin Densley collection is here, and in spades: classical reflections cheek by jowl with pop culture, slantingly observed (subspeciality: 1960s American glamor); haunting lyricism blended with punchy, bracing demotic; extended travel through the highways, and especially the low-ways, of Australian history; mellow, poignant family stories illuminating the charms and oddities of lineage. But beyond his previous collections, Sacredly Profane carries a new and insistent note: pathos, laced with anger. It is present in the substantial eight-part sequence that concludes the book, "The Great War—AIF Suite." As might be expected from poems written during the period of First World War centenary commemorations, the individual pieces are clean, spare, and plangent, their tone respectful, subject matter bridging the miseries of trench and battlefield and the stoic attitude of the men who had to endure them. Major Percy Black, for instance, "of the handlebar moustache, / chiselled jaw, / dark wavy hair / and barrel chest," takes some necessary leave but is almost clobbered by a London bus. The unnamed narrator of "Squires" crawls into a foxhole alongside a body "struck in head by shrapnel / while not wearing helmet." Rather than chilled, or otherwise disturbed by the close-to-home death of an acquaintance's friend, the narrator is "too tired to feel horror." Or there is the jokey, smiling Corporal Jagoe, introduced in neat strokes, but soon cut down: I saw his body on a pathin woods at the back of the town.He was dead, unmarked,as if asleep.We who were lefthad to hurry on. Perhaps such understated savagery is no more than appropriate, a hundred years on from such scenes of indiscriminate, purposeless slaughter. But these notes of red-tinged sadness, shading into outright anger, recur throughout, marking what seems to me a new, remarkable phase of Densley's work. The poet is his usual waspish self in a poem such as "The Local Mayor Launches a Literary Magazine at the Outer Suburban Campus of a Large University." From the deadpan title to details of the interior life of a dignitary "who'd rort his travel expenses, / be having it off with his secretary … and happily cook the books / of his chain of hardware stores," all the high points of his established verse are here: the campus brass regard the bloviator, the poems performed, even the poet's "three sausages in bread / and two egg-and-lettuce sandwiches" as merelyan item to be notedin their annual report:yearly production of lit magazine—check. The mayor cannot tell the difference between magazine and book and would not care if he could. Ordinarily, this might have been the right note to strike, then move on—a gentle, almost affectionate satire of limited [End Page 400] dignitaries garlanding a cultural event they cannot comprehend, overseen by cynical administrators who ought to be able to do so but are too entrenched in cynical managerialism to bother. But Densley does not: 'Those eggheads couldn't give a fuckeither,'replied the mayor.'I know those types.On big salaries, good perks.Do bugger all.All right, I suppose I'll have to go.Might take some heat off me …that shit they've been writingin the local rag By any measure, this is dark, uncomfortable—albeit thrilling in its truth—and so much so that the poet rises (or perhaps descends) to a note of genuine despair at the poem's end, amid the "seemingly endless kilometres / of a desert that's outer suburbia": "was it worth going there at all?" Characteristically, the poet segues immediately into a wholly typical poem, "Kitchen," cataloguing the endless violence of food preparation—"Lamb hammered … Crustaceans boiled, / dismembered"—only to conclude archly, "Even the concrete floor / is distressed." Yet the spiritual violence that the reader senses underneath such playfulness is never far away. It is there in the telling details of "Ned Kelly's Last Hours," the prisoner's skull "used as a paperweight / by a minor public official." (Note...