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Kevin Brophy

An Inventory of Longing by Kevin Brophy

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April 2025, no. 474
Sarah Day reviews ‘An Inventory of Longing’ by Kevin Brophy

‘About Happiness’, the striking opening poem of Kevin Brophy’s latest collection, An Inventory of Longing, anticipates many that follow in the first half of this book. Empathy and reflectiveness are present in a melding of the individual with the social, with landscape, and with the enigmatic passage of time. The poem contains a moment, and it is timeless. It takes its readers on a walk along ‘the river’ in Paris where, at a confluence with a seamy canal, we meet a homeless man who sleeps beneath plastic sheets and shares his phone video of Sufi dancers, whose songs give him happiness and ‘can cure hunger’. ‘Meet’ is the operative word; this is not indifferent observation, but a human exchange. That only one of the parties can eventually walk away is troubling, for reader and speaker. The written poem is evidence of this. The encounter is humbling; the poem reflects deeply on the nature of happiness and, equally, suffering, in the broader context of time, which ‘slips ahead and past us, / pauseless as this river’s sleepless spinning onward happy rush’. In context, the final use of ‘happy’ becomes nuanced.

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‘May every kiss be a coastline’

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April 2021, no. 430

These three new poetry collections are works by established poets at the top of their game in terms of poetic craft and the honing of insights into both life and art. These are voices developed across a significant number of previous collections, allowing for an emergence of innovation, confidence, and ease of style and mood.

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Sandstone by Andrew Taylor

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May 1995, no. 170
Kevin Brophy reviews 'Sandstone' by Andrew Taylor

On my most recent visit to Warrnambool in December 1994, the newspapers carried a tragic story about some local youths who had been digging in the coastline dunes and sandstone cliffs outside the town. One of them had died when their cave collapsed. It is this wild, unpredictably dangerous but attractive coastline that features in the title sequence to Andrew Taylor’s new book. In Sandstone, the blurb on the back cover tells us, Taylor returns ‘to the sight [sic] of his childhood’.

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Kevin Brophy is Poet of the Month

December 2018, no. 407
Kevin Brophy is Poet of the Month

Hours on each line, weeks on a stanza, months on the whole poem, but with long breaks between. Most poets spend most of their time not writing poetry, and it has to be this way.

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Look at the Lake by Kevin Brophy

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September 2018, no. 404
Joan Fleming reviews 'Look at the Lake' by Kevin Brophy

Kevin Brophy’s latest book is a record of the year he spent living in the remote Aboriginal community of Mulan. The community is home to predominantly Walmajarri people, and is on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert, sixteen hours’ drive from Broome. He was given a decomposing house to ...

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States of Poetry WA | State Editor Kevin Brophy introduces series two of the WA anthology

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States of Poetry Podcast - Series Two

In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, State Editor Kevin Brophy introduces the second series of ABR's Western Australian States of Poetry anthology.