A Schoolbag Full, John Kelly. Grace Avenue Publications. ISBN 9780646838519
For some poets writing poems is a serious but segmented part of their lives. For Adelaide poet and teacher John Kelly it is his natural and preferred form of self-expression. His latest book of poems focuses on his life in education. From his boyhood growing up in Adelaide, to the places where he was introduced to the tradition he inherited, to his intellectual passions and his wrestling with the challenges of passing on to students the humane tradition – everything is food for poems.
As you would hope from such a passion for poetry and from such a book title, the poems in A Schoolbag Full are not tidily curated and measured. Poems pour out of it in all shapes and sizes, some worked over at length, others spontaneous, some reflective and some polemical, some disciplined and others spilling out of their wrappings.
Kelly has a gift for noticing and celebrating the small ways in which we brush up against our world, shown especially in his poems about his childhood. He also has a passion for honouring and embodying and passing on what he has inherited. His poems exploring his Irish background, particularly through visiting Ireland, are especially moving in their recognition both bracing and freeing, that life bursts beyond the tabernacles in which we confine it. This is holy ground, and the diction is more crystalline.
Kelly’s care for tradition with its disciplines and its layers underlies the more combative poems, mostly directed against ignorant dismissal of the past in the name of a shallow celebration of the fashions of the present. This book does not merely curse the darkness. It keeps the candle alight.