Kirsty Gunn introduces Anne Kennedy
Reading Anne Kennedy is not like reading at all.
It's like watching a life spin and turn, like a washing machine of words, flipping and sorting and humming with the day to day business of families and children and houses and milk bottles and doctor's appointments and scattered conversations…And love. Always love...
Sing-song tips us right from the outset into the midst of Anne's project –
This afternoon our little daughter
sang her first small lark's descent…
She's a latecomer to singing
and I'll tell you why…
and off we go – on a wild, desperate singing, spinning tale of botched hopes and dark fears, the sickness of a little baby turning into the sickness of a little girl…The parents' anxiety, the child's brave unknowingness, a doctor's mis-diagnosis set against endless prescriptions …A whirl of linked poems knotted and fretted with hope and despair that nevertheless manage to spin their way, over the course of one book, out of trouble towards humour and gentleness and understanding.
It's hard to choose one poem over another in Sing-song because the poet has made her work to be read in sequence, in one sitting – just like singing. Anne Kennedy is special that way – not only in her seizing upon her intensely personal subject, her own particular tune, but also in her creation of a vital narrative imperative. These are page-turning poems! And they follow one after another like verses in the most engaging, idiosyncratic ballad you've ever heard.
So which verse to choose? When I want to open my mouth and sing the whole song? In the end I must settle upon ‘I Am (1)' for the particular print of it, of the poet and her life upon me – the sense of a tiny moment in a child's life representing everything to do with maternal tenderness and inchoate expressions of protection and care and duty, all bound up here in the moment when our child in the middle of the night comes into our bed…
Every night she wakes and makes
herself seem big the way she thumps
across the hall. Those footfalls cast
a grown-up shadow, minimised
when she arrives at her parents'
bed. A night-light, weak-wattaged
blinks on and chases away the adult
her. That can wait, she's got all night
and all the days of her life.
How dense with meaning and emotions are these two short verses - and how beautifully, simply rendered. Hard to believe the complexity of mortality is gathered in to these direct and straightforward sentences. Anne Kennedy's poems are intensely allusive, but allude to their own world. They allude to themselves. So the night light and the shadow on the wall need no explaining…Or the cream, and the guilt and the scratching…We've been living in the midst of the poet's world since we opened the book and read the first poem about eczema and bad choices about everything from houses to doctors…All of the words known to us from the beginning. Anne's world – and not just because I'm a mother too – is… familiar.
In that last verse, ‘Thumps across the hall', ‘grown up shadow', ‘she's got all night and all the days of her life…', all sound like I'm reading in my own voice. This is a poet sharing with us her own life so intensely, so musically that we can't help ourselves, just as with any sing-song, from joining in.
Of course, yes, there's motherhood, too… It's humming away there, all the time, in the pages of Sing- song , at the heart of this poem. Mother love. Mother love. It's the love, in the end, that inspires all these poems. Love that turns itself inside out to become the love that's the very definition of love: that is, with no self at all. This poet is full up with that kind of love, the sort that's as far removed from the traditional love poem with its traditional celebration of one self and its love for another as could be. It spills onto the pages and turns into baptism, epithalamion and elegy all at once. And here it is, all of piece, swaddling clothes and blankets and bandages… A mother with her tiny, hurting child in all its singing, turning wide-awake-in-the-middle-of-the-night entirety…. ‘I am' because ‘You are'.
Anne Kennedy
I Am (1)
Every night she wakes and makes
herself seem big the way she thumps
across the hall. Those footfalls cast
a grown-up shadow, minimised
when she arrives at her parents'
bed. A night-light, weak-wattaged
blinks on and chases away the adult
her. That can wait, she's got all night
and all the days of her life. Her mother
gathers her in like harvest, long days
much to do, keep going, soon there will be
lanterns and dancing, and comforts her, her
season, smoothes on the cream prescribed
by every health professional who's ever
seen her (it) (eczema). Keep the faith, feed
the soil, in a small lifetime it will be morning.
About Anne Kennedy
 Anne Kennedy is Pakeha of Irish descent. She has published five books of fiction and poetry, including the novel A Boy and His Uncle (Picador) and the poetry sequence Sing- song ( Auckland University Press). Her short fictions have featured widely in New Zealand journals and anthologies. She has won several awards, including the 2004 Montana New Zealand Poetry Award and the BNZ/Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award, and has held fellowships at the University of Auckland and the University of Hawai`i at Manoa. Her most recent book is the narrative poem, The Time of the Giants (AUP), which concerns a legacy of the Irish diaspora. Anne has worked as a screenwriter, editor and reviewer, and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Hawai`i in Honolulu. She is a co-editor of the online literary journal, Trout.
Titles
available from SPL
Sing-song (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003)
The Time of the Giants (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2005)
Related
links
Auckland University Press
New Zealand Book Council
Best New Zealand Poems - see 2004, 2005, 2007
Trout, an online journal of NZ and Pacific writing
About
Kirsty Gunn
 Kirsty Gunn was born and grew up in Wellington,where she took classes in American Poetry and writing with Bill Manhire at Victoria University. Those early years of her life filled her up with a sense of New Zealand that's now the raw material of everything she writes from her home in London and Edinburgh. Her novella The boy and the sea gathers both New Zealand and Scotland into its waters and was winner of the Sundial Scottish Book of the Year 2007. Featherstone, a New York Times Notable Book, was an amalgam of a small town in the Wairarapa and a village in the Perthshire hills.
And all of her work has at its centre: home. Her most recent book, 44 things, is a series of contemplations, stories and essays on domestic life and motherhood that, like Anne Kennedy's poetic project, celebrates everyday ordinariness and lets it sing.
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