[Tim Murphy]

Les Murray is publishing this short appreciation in Quadrant:

Kenny Review

This Way to the Exit is Janet Kenny’s first full length collection of poems. Kenny is une femme d’un certain age, a Kiwi who made her way as a mezzo soprano in England, as a political activist in Sydney. She and her sweetheart of 56 years’ commitment made their way to Oz 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 practicing 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.


This Way to the Exit, White Violet Press, Torrence, California, 65 pages, $14 USD

[Marybeth Rua-Larsen]

I will also add my mini-review, which appeared on Goodreads:

Janet Kenny’s This Way to the Exit… is full of wise poems, poems that help us get from here to there, poems that open our eyes to the worlds of art and nature, and poems that help us survive and even relish the darkness and the process of aging. That she does so through skillful and accomplished writing in forms such as sonnets, rhyming quatrains and numerous nonce forms makes the poems all the sweeter.
While I have always enjoyed Kenny’s nature poems, the effortless and elegant way she writes about birds and wild animals, it is the poems on aging that I admire most. They are honest and clear-sighted, yet filled with compassion and humor, even defiance. In “Sightlines,” for example, Kenny writes about the Sydney (Australia) painter Lloyd Rees, who was losing his vision in later life:

…Only will
could reignite his vision. He stared down
the sun that splashed the water in his mind
and dived deep in the light he knew would drown
his reason with the sight that made him blind.

Kenny knows it takes determination – and art – to make a life, too keep it going, to fulfill one’s destiny and live it meaningfully. These are poems that both console and encourage us forward. They remind us that when we are gone, our art lives in those we inspire to read, recite and perform it:

“But dreams continue after death,
exhaled upon a singer’s breath.”

(from “To Franz Schubert”)

[Terese Coe]

Tim and Marybeth,

Thanks for these appreciations of Janet's work. Like you, Marybeth, I think what you call her "defiance" and I would perhaps call her "fierce individualism" has been a great boon to her writing!

My deep congratulations to Janet Kenny!

[Michael Cantor]

Add my thanks. An excellent book!

[Charlotte Innes]

Thanks, Tim and Marybeth, for opening the door to some lovely poetry that I'm not so familiar with. The language is gorgeous. "Effortless and elegant" is right, Marybeth. I will have to read more,

And it's White Violet Press--kudos to Karen Kelsay again!

Charlotte