Seamlessly through the Quatrains

Janet Kenny, This Way to the Exit (White Violet Press, 2012), 65 pages, US$14

This Way to the Exit is Janet Kenny’s first full-length collection of poems. Kenny is une femme d’un certain age, a New Zealander who made her way as a mezzo soprano in England and as a political activist in Sydney. She and her sweetheart (now of fifty-six years commitment) made their way to Australia in 1970, then north to Hervey Bay in Queensland seven years ago. She only turned the full powers of her attention to writing verse twelve years ago, and it has been my privilege throughout this time to watch her start, stop, stutter, and develop into the author of this excellent book.

The first thing the reader will note is Kenny’s command of formal verse, for the first three poems are pentameter sonnets. As is the case for all superb poets, the constraints of meter and rhyme are liberators of the imagination, which in Kenny’s case is formidable. Her book is dedicated “To Music”, and I can’t help imagining a girl beside a piano practising scales before I was born. This is an artist conditioned by decades of discipline.

Technically, what I value most in the new verse coming from women who take up my art in mezzo camin, is accuracy of observation and expression, and the reader will find that in abundance in Kenny.

The ability to rhyme, to run sentences seamlessly through the quatrains, to observe and paint accurately—these are prerequisites. But the poet has a higher duty than mastering the tools of her trade, and that is fearlessly to write songs of love and sorrow for the world she inhabits. Kenny is as hard left as I am hard right, but thanks in part to her, Australia is a country of my imagination. Let me close my brief review of this book with a love song by Janet.                      

Orang-utan 

If my arms were gangly like theirs. I’d swing in the canopy,
lope in elliptical attitudes, changing my shape,
study and try to avoid unavoidable entropy,
learn about edible fruits from a scholarly ape.
I’d leap in arboreal loops through the tangled immensity
and dangle through chlorophyll rays in a luminous sky.
Below me the forest would glow with a jade-like intensity;
I’d dance over darkness, unfurl with the orchids and fly.