While you, our dear readers, await our most recent assortment of pyrotechnics and pipe bombs in volume three of Sūdō Journal, we considered it worth directing your attention to a new collection of poetry from Kevin Densley. Those of you well acquainted with Sūdō Journal may recall Tenille McDermott’s review of his previous anthology, Orpheus in the Undershirt, in our very first volume, and it should come as no surprise that Sacredly Profane reaffirms Densley’s capacity to intermingle touchstones of highbrow and lowbrow culture in cutting fashion.
In one sense, the concepts that underpin Sacredly Profane are perhaps most clearly at play in poems such as “Muscular Christianity,” where sudden shifts in tone destabilise modern conceptions of the sacred: “Looking at the Station of the Cross / in which Christ is stripped, I reflect / —He must have been working out” (39).
Elsewhere, however, there are more brutal twists that hit like a punch in the gut. In “Bad Behaviour” Densley recounts the story of his “four times great-grandfather, Thomas,” punishing his son “because he wagged school / to attend a triple public hanging / outside the Launceston Gaol” (43).
As in Orpheus in the Undershirt, there are interspersed allusions to an unlikely assemblage of subjects ranging from Classical myth, to football, to nineteenth-century composers, to suburban life in 1960s Australia, but here they are combined in ways that lead to more acerbic conclusions. It is in this spirit that “The Local Mayor Launches a Literary Magazine at the Outer Suburban Campus of a Large University,” skewers the bureaucratisation of the Australian literary scene:
—they don’t really care
about what is going on.
To them, this occasion is merely
an item to be noted
in their annual report:
yearly production of lit magazine—check.
Me? I am sniffing
the sausages spitting on the barbecue,
lamenting the occasion is dry. (19)
Nevertheless, Sacredly Profane provides glimmers of relief to the stark pessimism of poems such as “Ned Kelly’s Last Hours” and “Sorrento, Victoria, 1983.” There are moments of connection to be found here, too. A father rescues his son from drowning and relics of previous generations are found in unlikely places, and an extended sequence of poems entitled “The Great War—AIF Suite” concludes the collection with a sense of pathos that never feels unearned.
Sacredly Profane is available either directly from the Ginninderra Press website, or from your local independent bookseller.
Image: “angel” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by marsupium photography