Melody and verse

The Australian folk singer Paul Kelly loves poetry. How does he love it? Let us count the ways.

In 2019, Penguin published an anthology titled Love Is Strong as Death: Poems Chosen by Paul Kelly—more than 300 poems chosen by Kelly, as it turns out. If he has over 300 favorites, he must’ve read a few hundred, or a few thousand, more. That’s a lot of love.

Then, in 2021, Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre hosted Kelly reading (and sometimes singing) from his anthology, first via video (all 13 clips are still viewable on YouTube), then, as COVID restrictions began easing, live.

Now comes Kelly’s latest “digital mix tape,” Poetry. (Actually, it came out in April, which was National Poetry Month, but as April is also National Stress Awareness Month, National Volunteer Month, National Garden Month, and National Kite Month, you might’ve missed the occasion.)

Poetry compiles Kelly’s arrangements of verse by Shakespeare, Hopkins, Hardy, Plath, Whitman, Langston Hughes, Thomas, and Larkin (to cite just the “big” names)—24 selections in all, 22 of which first appeared on his previous albums.

As a singer, Kelly falls midway between the Bob Dylan of Planet Waves and the Bob Dylan of World Gone Wrong. But that characteristic isn’t all that distinguishes his renditions from art song. Whether accompanying himself on acoustic guitar or joined by a small ensemble, he enunciates clearly. Even when he has to squeeze lines such as Hopkins’ “shéer plód makes plough down sillion shine” into his musical structures, he resists verbal shortcuts.

He does make the occasional adjustment, turning a line into a refrain or, in the case of John Shaw Neilson’s “Surely God Was a Lover,” turning the “was” into an “is.” He also cuts Whitman’s “I Think I Could Turn and Live With Animals” down to its first nine lines. But in a project of this type, a little Whitman goes a long way.

A little melody does too. Thus does the spoken-more-than-sung “Sailing to Byzantium” get by, leaving the striking nonverbal effects to the Ensemble of the Australian National Academy of Music. But sometimes Kelly offers more than a little melody. His lively setting of Dylan Thomas’ “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” could win over Jimmy Buffett fans.

Better yet, it might also make them curious about Romans 6 (the ninth verse of which provided Thomas with his title), tune them in to Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur,” and help them see in Gwen Harwood’s “Barn Owl” a visceral metaphor for Paradise lost.