Anne Kennedy's The Sea Walks into a Wall is a deftly imagined poetry collection

Anne Kennedy. Photo / Supplied

The Sea Walks into a Wall
by Anne Kennedy
Auckland University Press, $25

It's obvious from her new poetry collection, The Sea Walks into a Wall, that Anne Kennedy is a writer for whom form ignites language. I can imagine Kennedy stretching and condensing each piece here until it relaxed perfectly into its final shape, and that satisfaction is one of the collection's many joys.

The Sea Walks into a Wall is impressive not simply because of its range of tone and voice or its display of the depth of Kennedy's craft. (She won the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry in 2021.) I'm moved by this collection's insistence on abundance, humour, and delight in a world of tension and lack. That even within the restrictions of a pandemic, "I'll meet you in paradise in my mask". What astounds me here, beyond technical experiment, is the overwhelming breadth of what is seen, encompassed, pressed into words.

The collection's title is only the first sign that, within these poems, all is not well. The sea hates the wall. The stream is sick. And — over and over again, in the list poem An Hour, "The person of the hour just earned the minimum wage less tax." This collection deals with unease — in and with nature, and between each other on personal and governmental levels — to the point of necessary exhaustion. Yet Kennedy captures and notates voice with precision, so the more obviously political passages and poems read not as cold castigation or censure, but as wholehearted woe, frustration, stubbornness, and apathy, and though anger is here, as it should be, it isn't overly justified as to become self-righteous.

Light On in the Garden, one of the longer, more essayistic poems of the collection, is also one of the angriest. It's a narrative of many layers of inequality, ignorance and the tension between money and art:

The guys on the exec team hate art.

They watch a movie sometimes, hum along to a tune in the car,

buy jewellery for their wives,

but the guys on the polytech executive team really hate art.

Surely they visit the Met when

in New York, used to moondance in their twenties,

and they all wear clothes,

but sadly the members of the polytechnic executive committee

hate art.

Kennedy is a poet who knows just how far to stretch tone and form in each extended piece to concoct a balance of richness, excitement and patience that delivers these poems to, instead of hiding them from, the reader.

Reviewed by Sophie van Waardenberg

Sophie van Waardenberg is studying towards an MFA in poetry at Syracuse University in the US, where she serves as co-editor-in-chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her first chapbook-length collection of poems was published in AUP New Poets 5. A longer version of this review will appear at anzliterature.com.