Home and away.(Earthly Delights)(Book review)

Earthly Delights, by S.K. Kelen; Pandanus Books, 2006, $19.95.

WITH EARTHLY DELIGHTS, his seventh collection, it's clear that S.K. Kelen now possesses a very distinct poetic style which has moved some distance away from its original inspirations. He likes to take something mundane, a suburban "domestic" (as in "Notebook #2", for example) and thoroughly defamiliarise it through his quirky imagery, his mixed-level diction and his characteristically jerky rhythms. There is often, too, a strange religious sense--pantheist, perhaps, or animist.

Many of the poems have strong narrative elements. In "Hanoi Girls", for instance, he tells the diurnal story of how, after "a great hush of sleeping descends" over the city, the citizens rise with the sound of a rooster in the nearby ricefields and, in no time at all, "suddenly the girls are there, dozens, then hundreds riding motor scooters". Kelen admires both what they symbolise and their sheer sense of style: "they fit imitation Gucci so much better". Given what their mothers and grandmothers experienced during the Vietnam War, the "good daughters have everything their mothers / and fathers missed".

Another memorable narrative is set in India where, in the poem "Letting Go", a rather naive tourist, over quite a few stanzas, gives away almost everything she possesses to the beggars milling about her. Eventually, she is quietly rescued by an Indian man whose "eyes held special intelligence of what to do". Luckily, she still has her Mastercard left. "Here he was, a strange man in a strange land. / He bowed nobly and hailed a taxi."

Unlike some other poets, Kelen is able to get into the particularities of these Third World situations. Without either preaching or sentimentalising, he gives a good sense of what life is actually like for the locals, in all its positives and negatives. He doesn't assume they are all in love with the idea of a Western lifestyle but nor does he deny its attractions to ...