Essentially Unfinished, Selected poems from 1964-2024

John Kelly, [email protected], ISBN 978-1-925543-10-0

In this splendid collection John Kelly has selected poems written over 60 years. They include poems from earlier collections, including those about his schooldays in Adelaide in A Schoolbag Full. Teachers in many schools have drawn on these poems to open students’ eyes to the youthful lives of their grandparents’ generation. As with other poems in this collection they display his gift for describing the touch, feeling and even smell of his world. They are evocative but never sentimental.

Essentially Unfinished reveals the development of John Kelly’s style and interests over a lifetime. Some elements, however, remain constant. They include a passionate and continuing engagement in life in his calling as a teacher and in the changing culture of the times. The poems also display a pervading fascination with faith in its grammar and in its celebration. Many of his poems are lyrical in their treasuring of things both seen and hoped for. Others are angry, as when dealing with theories and practices in teaching which sell short the human richness of human life and of language. Others are marked by longing, as when he writes of things Irish both as an ideal and as a reality seen on a later visit.

The book is fastidiously presented and preceded by an affectionate and insightful preface by John Honner written with the care and the sensitive ear that the poems merit. It is well worth reading in its own right.