IN THE NAME OF OUR FAMILIES

In their fourth round of dialogue, Kwame Dawes and John Kinsella set themselves the intertwined tasks of exploring the long poetic line and making raids upon what has always been implicit in their conversations, the meaning of family. The long-breathed line becomes metonym and metaphor for a subject that is slippery, devious, problematic, comforting and challenging. Poems acknowledge the life-giving support of the domestic, but also confess that though they may write 'in the name of our families our families will care less for we will always fail them'. Theres the difficult meaning of ancestry: for Kinsella the heroic myths of the settler past, the grandmother 'usurping/with her birth cry' the land that once belonged to the aboriginal Noonga people, and knowing that as the family tree spreads, physical trees 'fall so fast. Roots and all'