JEAN KENT

Launch speech: 'To Speak of Grasses', by Kathryn Fry

Walleah Press (2025)

Newcastle Writers Festival, 6th April 2025. Watt Space Gallery, Newcastle.

Three years ago, I was delighted to be here at the Newcastle Writers’ Festival, launching Kathryn Fry’s second collection of poetry, The Earth Will Outshine Us. Like her first book, Green Point Bearings, that book is rich with beautifully recognisable plants and creatures of the Australian landscape, as well as moving observations of people and insightful responses to events in Kathryn’s own life.

It shouldn’t be surprising to find the same rewards in this third collection, To Speak of Grasses. I expected it to be an impressive book, and yet, over many readings, the accomplishment of the poems and their unfailingly appealing content have repeatedly taken my breath away. Once again, there are decades of wisdom and experience behind this poetry, and athryn’s generous spirit makes the world and the people she finds in it shine as if they’re being seen for the first time.

The first poem in the book is a good glimpse of what’s to come. It’s called ‘Forecast’, and it begins like this:

            “Lotus buds tight as the tips of tulips emerge
                          slowly, one after the other over summer

           each rising above the leafy greenery
                           as flags raising hope for the Earth.”

What follows is a wonderfully immersive description of how the buds develop, flowering in a place which is not their natural home. Like the seeds which will be housed “in cells / like monks in their temple, meditating”, the poem itself becomes a meditation on the uncertainties of life within a changing world – a place where looking every morning for blooms “in the labyrinth of stems” is

           “a ritual like scrolling
                         for the forecast, for news of flood or fire.”

There is a lovely balance in this poem between celebrating the gifts of nature and acknowledging how our human presence may be disrupting the future of the planet.

The poem which follows, ‘Revelations from Dudley’, is even more affecting. It combines filmic descriptions of being on the rocks at Dudley, “near the edge of the Sydney Basin. That hole / into which all manner of debris fell / after the Great Dying …” with an avid desire to know the geological history of this place. Kathryn writes

                         “… Sandstone I’m sitting on now
           is two hundred and fifty-two million years old, so I’m learning
                         from a geologist on the move, his arms wide
           with the verve of this ancient story: of river energies

           flood plains and sediment brought down … “

All through this poem, there are sudden swerves to a personal connection with the geological stresses. This happens so naturally, but it’s still a surprise and with the lightest touch, Kathryn adds depth and new meaning to all the images and content that have gone before.

The end is especially moving. While the geologist is “reading an overhang like a book he learned / by heart”, someone closer to Kathryn’s heart comes centre stage:

           “… I think of you, our different ways
                         as he points to cross-beds and current flow …

           We’re soon to find iron-rich fossilised trunks
                         lying willy-nilly, but I’m stuck on tension
           between plates or any two-things close

           like you and me, and the stresses of our years:
                         scant stuff on the earth’s clock yet, here we are
           by a graceful force, having scaled any upheavals.”

One of the special features of this book that I particularly relish is the feeling it captures of time – time in Nature, spanning millennia, but also time in a life which has already passed three score years and ten.

Poets often begin writing during the passionate years of late adolescence / early adulthood. First loves, first heartbreaks, experiences from that intense period of becoming our selves call out for expression in poems. It’s rarer to find poems with that same urgency from later life – but Kathryn gives them to us, honestly, capturing the challenges, but also relishing the triumphs of survival.

I can’t help laughing in recognition of the truth in her introductory image to ‘The Long Sequel’, her all-encompassing tribute to a five decades long marriage:

           “Tiffs bubble up like hot-spots in super-heated / soup.”

What follows is equally recognizable: “Though now our brains light up more / in the let-it-be circuitry”. Memories of the wedding – “awkward speeches, how little we knew” – lead on to beautifully tender recollections of the young couple discovering music (and friendship) together, the arrival of children and the “surfeit to juggle”, coping with the demands of a family of five.

Through it all, the poem has a beautiful connection to what is going on at the same time in the natural world: the garden’s dogwood flowers – “a profusion of upturned hands”; a sojourn in Kingfisher country with “Water gums bent under the business of bees” … and also, the healing possibility of being “wrapped in river zest / cleansed of doubt, focussed by the river’s / force cocooned in the river’s light.”


Kathryn has an unerring instinct for noticing “Aah!” moments and capturing them. Her curiosity and sense of wonder at the world can turn an extraordinary range of subject matter into poetry. She writes about places from the Pilbara to Kosciusko, from Brisbane to Canberra, and of course, her current home, Lake Macquarie.

At “The Old Sand Mining Site’, where she volunteers for Trees in Newcastle, she notes that

                         “       To bend, to tend to the garden and nursery
                         is to feel the weight of your shadow-self evaporate
                         as if being in no time.”

There is a lot of tending and caring in this book – not just for plants and the environment, but also for family, especially grandchildren. There is also a very moving stretching of time to acknowledge friends and people no longer with us but kept alive in memory.

Kathryn’s world is rich with art and music as well. We don’t need to know the paintings or the concert pieces she talks about ourselves – she communicates her own experiences of them with such enthusiasm. Like the choir performing the ‘Magnificat’, her poems sing out ‘clear joy’. Her words have their own personal music, which is a joy for us, her readers, to hear.

There is so much more in To Speak of Grasses I would like to talk about: the timeless rocks and “home-spun hummock grasses” in the title poem; the fun with language and colourful imagery in a ‘Vaudeville” of birds; the sensory delights of wildflowers and landscape at Dead Horse Gap; a People’s Climate March in New York City …

Whenever I open the book, I continue to be surprised by how easily the poems lift off the page, but also how charmingly they linger and reward re-reading. This is not a book to read once and forget: it is one to go back to, again and again.

I’d like to leave you with another short glimpse of the very vivid poetic world Kathryn has created with some lines from her poem ‘Antidote’. On a walk after rain,

           “Whipbirds, honeyeater and ravens
           drum up a tin-pot band—the show flares

           with sulphur-crested cockatoos before
           the next sudden shower. People you pass

           seem open and warm; your own shortcomings
           stowed aside. Three butterflies lift their wings.

           And before you hear today’s news of suffering
           and black hope, of conflict and stormy fraud

           you stand stilled as light turns leaves
                                        into ripples of shimmer.

Congratulations, Kathryn! I heartily recommend To Speak of Grasses, and I am delighted to declare it launched.

Jean Kent