Sacredly Profane

'Sacredly Profane has all the outstanding qualities of Kevin Densley's previous collections - sparky lyricism, revealing jaunts down the byways of history, an abiding fascination with overlapping high and low cultures - but also a new, and strangely timely, element: deep, resonant pathos. Readers can still find sea-horses delicate as embryos, dreamy girlfriends naked in Arcady and childhood athletes shattered like meringues, but also the erasure of families from a bleak landscape ("There is nothing but shifting sand") and, in a major sequence on the Great War, Percy Black "of the handlebar moustache, chiselled jaw, dark wavy hair and barrel chest" and gunshot wounds, gas attacks and letters that stop, forever. It is a turn which only deepens and enhances those other elements. Densley's work makes us stand back and look at our assumptions about life, art and the politics of them both. What really motivates the corrupt local mayor to stand on a podium, flexing a copy of a poetry magazine on launch day at the suburban university? Where else would a child feel the fleeting pull of holy yellow light but St Matthew's Anglican Church, East Geelong? And who but great-great grandfather William, breeder of prize-winning hens and roosters, could brood from a century-old wedding photograph without donning a tie, and wearing shoes that could do with a polish? Nothing in Sacredly Profane provides the answers, but then nothing should. Instead, let the lines spin out and the words pick up their marvellous, higgledy dance, till they leave you on the far shore more desolate than in earlier days, but also more hopeful gasping and reeling and pop-eyed with gratitude.' - James Roderick Burns