Paper Bark Press
Duty
Winner of the Mary Gilmore Prize: Most Outstanding First Book of Poetry, 2001-02
'She dances in the special clothes of poetry. A rare bird indeed! Geraldine McKenzie is a new voice in Australian poetry. She writes with passion and intelligence, coalescing space and time.'
~ Dorothy Hewett
'Hear Ye! Hear Ye! Geraldine McKenzie in entering the hall of language mirrors. Listen for the inflections of the reflections. Duty calls. And then some.'
~ Charles Bernstein
'Coming across Geraldine McKenzie's poetry was an exciting experience – here's a new and individual talent, a complex vocabulary, and a strong and vigorous voice. I can't wait to read her first collection of poems.'
~ John Tranter
'(Geraldine McKenzie) foregrounds the weight, shapes and textures of words, so that, in combination with the distinctive corporeality of her imagery, her poems are imbued with a living energy. Although they are artificial constructs made of language, they give the impression that they are speaking for themselves... By juxtaposing the rhythms of everyday speech, colloquial language (including slang and expletives), grand philosophical gestures and images of domesticity and nature, the poems are filled with disjunctions that make them leap up off the page – the effect created is a kind of harmonious discord.
'Geraldine McKenzie's eclectic style gives her poetry an energy and individuality, which renders anew the old themes of love, loss, sexuality, tradition, family connections, art – and poetry itself. In their contribution to "the great dance of plurality" her poems are an inspiring and revitalising force. The publication of her first collection... will be a significant poetry event.'
~ Amanda Moriarty
'...work of exceptional sensitivity and grace, exhibiting an exquisite control of language and craft... sensuality, intelligence and subtle humour... a high degree of craftmanship.'
~ Evan Williams, Secretary, NSW Ministry of Arts
'A poetry that's been highly and/or deeply influenced by the American 'language' workers, notably – I think – by Susan Howe, whose Emily Dickinson poems stage one hell of an argument with the Calvinism that makes the context and animates the feeling-tones of Dickinson's poetry. Geraldine McKenzie writes into a European-Jewish context, less metaphysically morbid than Dickinson's, but equally authoritarian... With incredible persistence and a lot of artistry McKenzie evokes such a context: the way-up-there traditions of European High Art – the magnificence, the criminally exquisite conceits, and the names that go with them – Mozart, Franz Marc, Yeats, for instance. This high culture is imbricated with the death camps of the Jewish holocaust, remarkably in the poems 'Illuminations' and 'Testament'. In the latter the slippery conscience and small scale power anxieties of a German homme moyen sensual – the cream-filled pastry that can "obliterate Rumania", the quick lust and paterfamilial bossiness – are graphically done. 'Illuminations' makes its central situation that of the female Jewish musicians who were forced to form small orchestras and play the classics in the death camps (there's a film about them starring Vanessa Redgrave, available on video). McKenzie does wonders with the material, her poetry managing an unclichéd tenderness while indelibly etching the violence. But the religion's argument here is inevitably an argument with a God who could countenance such things, so McKenzie opens it to argue with poetry and finally with language itself, the intractable English language, a tongue not built for poetry (which makes some of its poets' achievements the more remarkable). McKenzie digs very deeply into English poetic traditions, via Empson (is all lyric poetry indeed a "version of pastoral"?), bringing out the rain-like beauty of old English lyrics, recapturing for a contemporary reader glimpses of that original magic. But McKenzie also gives her own sense of poetic history the rough end of the pineapple, questioning incessantly the claims of art (poetry) to be redemptive... Duty could make you think, if you let it. Aside from many passages that work poetic sorcery (e.g. "your standing in my doorway / lopsided with lust offering to turn shadow into flesh / with gestures shaped through time / so humans might pass, briefly, out") there's boldness, rudeness, broadsides to get into, to engage with... Duty will feed your astonished and admiring head...'
~ Kerry Leves
See also
Second thoughts on quiet things
Duty (and Summer by Martin Harrison) reviewed by Peter Rose, Spectrum, the Sydney Morning Herald