TWO TITLES
Kathryn Fry's poetry collection
To Speak of Grasses,
and
Kit Kelen's poetry collection
in early light ~ aubades
Kathryn Fry | To Speak of Grasses (2025)
Kathryn Fry’s poems in To Speak of Grasses are luminous with insight and attention. Clear-eyed, unsentimental, and with an ear
as attuned to a Beethoven concerto as to the symphonies of the bush, she juxtaposes the evolution of land and lifeforms
from first cells to family. In linking the fibre of grasses—whether in the desert, forest or underwater or the strange
forms of grass trees and the humped mounds growing the land of the Pilbara—to the fibre of being, Fry hits that sweet spot
between observation and contemplation again and again.
Dael Allison
Kit Kelen | in early light ~ aubades (2025)
These freewheeling Hopkinsesque, Dylanesque, fragmentary poems have the
thrilling feeling of “the still wet canvas” of dawn with its “light that breaks down
doors” and suddenly you see, waking again and again to the newness of world
and “the firstliness of birds / born to the thin air chase”. With gentle brushstrokes
Kelen “rubs back a primed sky” with an irradiating light: “It’s just these little prints I
leave / barest of impressions” he says, but what an impression these poems leave
us indeed: “the practice of just where we are”, the meditation of poet being poet
being human being artist in this world right now – and how thankful I am for them.
Anne Kellas