Scavenger's Season
By Christopher (Kit) Kelen. Puncher & Wattmann. $25.
Kit Kelen's new collection, Scavenger's Season, would seem to be part of a newly-emerging genre in Australian poetry; a tradition which features the daily struggles and minor enlightenments of poets living on small blocks of land from which they derive little or no income.
Among other poets of this kind are John Kinsella in Western Australia and Mark Tredinnick in the NSW Southern Highlands. Though none of these three lives alone on his acreage, they all owe a direct or indirect debt to H.D. Thoreau's Walden (1854). They tirelessly note the seasonal and diurnal changes and their own responses to their surroundings, including the wildlife. It can be a rich vein to "mine", as it were.
Where Kinsella can often sound embattled and Tredinnick ultra-lyrical, Kelen displays a considerable ambivalence towards his situation. To judge from the book's biographical note, this uncertainty may derive from the fact that Kelen, for 14 years now, has taught at the University of Macau and doesn't get back to his property (near Bulahdelah, NSW) as often as he might. Thus many of the poems here are ones of re-acquaintance, of seeing what's happened in the interim and reflecting on what needs to be done. It can all seem an unsettling prospect.
Unlike the long, 19th-century sentences of H.D. Thoreau, however, Kelen uses unpunctuated short lines with a variety of rhythms, often iambic – though this may not be obvious at first reading owing to the lineation employed. The frequent ellipses of syntax and absence of traditional punctuation can make Kelen's verse seem quite contemporary but there is also an older flavour to it.
Kelen, for instance, is not beyond using apostrophe (the addressing of absent or inanimate beings) and occasional inversions of word order. A typical line (from Clocks Run out of Steam) is: "sun I've praised and sunshine too". It's a straight trochaic tetrameter and could have been written any time in the past four centuries. There's also a playfulness in this line, which is prevalent throughout. Kelen's narrator (surely the poet himself?) is often a little apologetic and self-deprecatory. He seems to acknowledge that the land needs closer attention than he is able to give it.
More than a hint of this is caught in the poet's implied response to the advice he gets from locals in his "set-piece" poem, Blokes: "Arriving in their utes and vans / they're always round here, day and / night, courting our Penelope. / Know what's next, what's what, when / why. Blokes know what to do and / what you need and even if you / can't decide. Blokes'll sort your / trouble out." The poem runs on in this style for another four pages and is a bemused, if comprehensive, account of a certain kind of Australian masculinity. Like Geoffrey Lehmann's Parenthood, it seems destined for the anthologies.
It's interesting to note in passing too that the punctuation in Blokes is orthodox. This reader's inclined to think that many of the other poems in the collection might have benefited from this strategy too – even though Kelen (like Patrick White in his prose) is a great user of sentence fragments. While Scavenger's Season may not be much use as a manual for block-holders (hardly its intention), it is certainly likely to provide smiles of recognition and a re-affirmation of their chosen lifestyle.
Geoff Page is a Canberra-based poet and reviewer.
