Cath Kenneally, 'eaten cold'

KENNEALLY, Cath—poetry, ‘eaten cold’

$20.00

Cath Kenneally is an Adelaide poet and novelist whose book Around Here (Wakefield Press, 2002) won the John Bray National Poetry Prize. Of her six volumes of poetry, the latest is eaten cold (Walleah Press, 2013), in which each poem responds to one in the volume Cold Snack (AUP) by Auckland poet Janet Charman. Kenneally’s two novels are Room Temperature and Jetty Road (both Wakefield Press). She works as a print and broadcast arts journalist, being Arts Producer at Radio Adelaide for many years and responsible for Writers Radio, an award-winning national community radio books and writing program. She was the inaugural CAL/J.M. Coetzee Writing Fellow at the Coetzee Centre at Adelaide University in 2016. She holds an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide. Her work has appeared in many national and international journals and anthologies, and been translated into several languages.


— ‘Australian Book Review’

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Cassandra Atherton, Cordite


In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, T. S. Eliot famously wrote, ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.’ Cath Kenneally’s eaten cold offers a chain of indelible response-poems to New Zealand poet Janet Charman’s book, cold snack. In Kenneally’s collection, ‘Meanings perpetually eingeschachtelt into meanings’, creating new and original poetry that riffs off Charman’s book without ‘imitating’ or ‘defacing’ it.


From the outset, Kenneally forges the important link between her poems and Charman’s, informing the reader: ‘each poem in this collection is a match for a corresponding poem in Charman’s … I intend these response-poems as a homage to Charman’s work.’ Honoring a poet in this way challenges response-poems in the tradition of Raleigh’s response to Marlowe’s ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’, written to debunk the original. Or, in the case of Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters, written in an attempt to overwrite the original with an alternative version of the same event. Interestingly, Kenneally points out that Charman, ‘approves of my poems, pronouncing them ‘foreign’ that is, quite distinct from the products of her own unique sensibility.’

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