R eading Christopher Kelen's first collection is like reading a newspaper. Test cricket, the national anthem, timber industry, unemployed, property developers, a marijuana raid, bushfires, all flicker past your eye mingled with fragments of popular song, nursery rhymes, and advertising slogans. This method is considered playful by some, but whether you call it that or cut-up or kaleidoscope or collage or by another name there is a cumulative glibness in it. There is another risk in this method. In an ideal world their masochism leaves them as unviable as the abolition of beaches.
Glibness leads easily to condescension.
Here even the blow-driers are morally ambiguous. Enjoying a good lunch on a fine day becomes sinister, which must be a surprise to most readers and certainly to other poets. Any suburb is a sparse dark place of unreason. Residents of such suburbs have, obviously, suspect breath and are masochists, and are probably implicated in moves to abolish or close public beaches. The latter is a startlingly lateral proposition to say the least.