Sacredly Profane

Sacredly Profane has all the outstanding qualities of Kevin Densleys previous collections - sparky lyricism revealing jaunts down the byways of history an abiding fascination with overlapping high and low cultures - but also a new and strangely timely element: deep resonant pathos. Readers can still find sea-horses delicate as embryos dreamy girlfriends naked in Arcady and childhood athletes shattered like meringues but also the erasure of families from a bleak landscape (There is nothing but shifting sand) and in a major sequence on the Great War Percy Black of the handlebar moustache chiselled jaw dark wavy hair and barrel chest and gunshot wounds gas attacks and letters that stop forever. It is a turn which only deepens and enhances those other elements. Densleys work makes us stand back and look at our assumptions about life art and the politics of them both. What really motivates the corrupt local mayor to stand on a podium flexing a copy of a poetry magazine on launch day at the suburban university? Where else would a child feel the fleeting pull of holy yellow light but St Matthews Anglican Church East Geelong? And who but great-great grandfather William breeder of prize-winning hens and roosters could brood from a century-old wedding photograph without donning a tie and wearing shoes that could do with a polish? Nothing in Sacredly Profane provides the answers but then nothing should. Instead let the lines spin out and the words pick up their marvellous higgledy dance till they leave you on the far shore more desolate than in earlier days but also more hopeful gasping and reeling and pop-eyed with gratitude. - James Roderick Burns