North Melbourne: Whitmore Press, 2025, 104pp.

There’s a good case for seeing Kevin Brophy as one of Australia’s most humane poets: humane in the double sense of being a sensitive and thoughtful human being in his poems but also in the sense of writing within a human-centred standpoint. That isn’t an easy thing to do since that kind of poetry has to fight against a drive towards blandness. Brophy has always managed this well: there is usually a lot more going on inside the poems than appears on the surface: surprise becomes a poetic technique here. And one of the surprises of An Inventory of Longing is the way the poems altogether provide a coherent context for each other to the extent that its third section, detailing interactions with a cat, far from being bathetic, accumulates a surprising richness.

The first section is made up of poems set in France. They are a long way from Jean Kent’s Paris Light though and have little interest in the registration of aspects of Parisian architecture and life. They are also a long way from Brophy’s home Melbournian suburb of Brunswick, the backdrop to so many of his poems. The first, and perhaps the best poem of An Inventory of Longing, significantly titled “About Happiness” as though to make sure that readers don’t think of it as a poem about a place, adopts what used to be a common mode but is now rarely used: that of a symbolically potent scenario. And it has all the hallmarks of an actual experience so that the result is closer to one of those meaningful snapshots of, say, Cartier-Bresson – an example whose nationality would suit the setting here. At both beginning and end of “About Happiness” is the Seine which “turns its glint green belly to the day”. It’s a symbol of time, conceived as process, but it also represents, in itself, a bland, busy happiness – “Shot through with morning light, time slips ahead and past us, / pauseless as this river’s sleepless spinning onward happy rush” – and, like all rivers, reflects the both the sky above and, here, the trees and cranes along its bank rather like the road in Stendhal’s Red and Black. Part of this scene, though in a sense completely opposed to it, is a homeless man who sleeps near the “oily mouth of a dark canal / where drifts congeal”. The canal is part of the river – at least, connected to it – but not part of the everyday busy happiness the river represents. And the man’s life is concerned with happiness, too. The man is not allowed access to the casual happiness of life, presumably at least partly because he is not accepted as a French citizen, and has instead recourse to a spiritual happiness in the shape of videos of dervishes whirling. But this is not completely sustaining:

. . . . . 
Every day I watch my Sufi dance it makes me happy,
but not for long, not for long enough,
the man had said, snapping closed his phone
as if it might explode. . .

To make the scenario even more complex, there is the image of a barge travelling upriver – ie against the current of happiness – to deliver sand. Poet and homeless man stand near the oily canal which leads to the river:

. . . . . 
Uniforms and flags, plastic sheets and Sufi videos
beside a slow canal might be all we’ll need for sure
though it’s still the promised happiness we long for.
Each river’s dreaming tongue must taste earth’s salt at last.
Like a boat unlashed from its capstan, each soul waking
in a doorway must swivel out into the sweeping current. . . 

This is a site of homelessness and fleeting religious happiness but it is also a site of nationalism (flags) and control (uniformed police in their cars). But one wonders finally about the stake of the poet himself in this. Perhaps he is removed and no more than a sympathetic recorder of the symbolic scene. But it is also possible – though never suggested in the poem – that his poetry, the writing of poetry, is equivalent to the homeless man’s dervish video: a cause of satisfaction and happiness but only a fleeting one, the sort of thing one does by a canal, far from the satisfaction of entering the flowing river.

One of the examples of the everyday in this poem – and there are a lot of them from crying children to slammed shut doors – is a bird – “a blackbird, fist-sized revelation”. You can see that the poem doesn’t want to make too much of this because it is rather outside of the symbolic set-up of the scene which is firmly anchored in the everyday world, but the blackbird, and other symbols of revelation, will recur through the book. Most significantly it makes an appearance in the final poem which describes, in the simplest language possible, a blackbird which follows the poet around while he does the gardening, looking out for turned-over worms and snails. It’s another symbolic scenario though one which doesn’t announce itself as such in the way “About Happiness” does. But the blackbird is a symbol (as that poem established) of revelation, of a visitant from a world beyond the soil of the everyday. It’s part of what could be seen as a classic humanist perspective: the poet’s feet are firmly grounded in the (hopefully humane) interactions of the everyday social world but he has an eye out for the larger world or worlds that might lie beyond. The poem itself, at its most blandly denotative, accepts this possible plurality:

. . . . . 
When friends tell me
there could be
several random blackbirds

I accept
what they say.

But I believe this one
comes back. . .

“Street Spring”, placed not far from “Blackbird” at the end of the book, deals with this issue. It begins with another symbolic setup: people going about their daily business: “Passing dogs and women, mothers on walks with children, / men talking into collars, / kids with phones at their noses” pass beneath a red wattlebird nest where a baby bird is screeching out its hunger:

. . . . . 
none look up
            at the yearning new-beaked burst

      of prayer where something irrepressible buds
    towards the future,

hangs all that word’s five syllables on springtime’s steamy
    sunshiny promise . . . 

An Inventory of Yearning there is, if anything, an emphasis on the likelihood that the “other” will actually be part of this world: in Eluard’s statement, known to most of us as one of the epigraphs to White’s The Solid Mandala, “There is another world, but it is within this one”. Poetry has, in fact, often been very interested in the notion of an otherworld. It can be conceived in religious terms as in the idea of the gheib in classic Persian poetry. But it can also be paralyzingly vast and horrendous: one is reminded of Gennady Aygi’s comment that those luminous but apparently casual portraits of Kafka show the face of a man who hasn’t merely seen this otherworld but who actually lives in it.

In two interesting poems from early in the book, the otherworld takes the comparatively uncomplicated form of the past and the future. “Mushroom Man” describes how a man picks mushrooms in the forest at night before selling them and earning enough to keep his life more or less on track. But the poem concludes by imagining the mushrooms to be the spirits of the soldiers who died in those woods in the “the last great war”. The poem before is a little vignette of a man fishing by yet another canal, his “thin rod trembling out as if in hope”, while a high-speed super train – the future personified, rushes past him. But when the other world is not something comprehensible, like the past or the future, most poets focus on the processes or psychopomps who might lead us there. Brophy’s blackbird is one of these – a creature from beyond – but the third section of An Inventory of Longing introduces us to the most homely of ambassadors from an otherworld: the domestic cat. And there is something fitting about this choice: Brophy’s poetry isn’t about grand gestures; it is much too firmly grounded in the everyday, the oily canal, for that.

“Nine Days With Rose” describes house-sitting a place that has a cat, Rose, significantly described as one which “half-belonged to the owners of the house, and half-belonged to a world difficult to imagine”. It’s a wonderful idea since we all know that cats are, like dreams, self-contained and complete and full of meaning but ultimately incomprehensible. One would have to be blindly egocentric to think of cats as pets, mere household appendages. Numerous Youtube videos of cats with mini-cameras fitted at their throats, for example, show us something of the strange world cats inhabit once they leave our houses. For Brophy, Rose’s messages from her “distant country” are conveyed in the silences they share while she is in the house, gracing them with her presence, and the end of the sequence meditates on how revelations from an otherworld can be passed on to us:

. . . . . 
There are bigger things, I’m guessing
you’re saying to me

than being this catty cat, this creaky Rose, morning visitor,
house companion, frightener of supermarket rats,
nudger of posts, table legs, junctions and doors,
watcher
alert to every car, dog, bin, bird and man in the neighbourhood.

There must be bigger things than biscuits in the morning,
fish in the evening, cool crannies safe from midday sun

-and these bigger things, you’re saying (are you?)’ 
can surface only in the day-long silences we’ve gone
to some trouble to create

within the tentative, worshipful, fearful ways we confer
about the long entanglement of truth with error.

Visitations, like the blackbird’s, tend to involve a vertical dimension (the cat rests under the house). The other component of a humanist vision is, of course, the horizontal one. How a human being interacts at a purely human level with other human beings. Brophy’s poetry is distinctive here. An Inventory of Longing is, like his other books, replete with examples of an empathy with others, something not as common amongst creative types as might be expected, creativity always having an element of monomania about it.

The climate in which these horizontal, human connections take place is a fairly bleak one, symbolised by the storms and darknesses that many of the poems register. Oncoming night, as in “To a Late Winter Day” brings with it its regular period of darkness although this is always balanced by the knowledge that morning will return. Something of this ambivalence is present in “Sunset” where the poet sits at a window waiting “for the old, baggy sack of day to close back over us”:

. . . . . 
It will close in the west after a child’s-breath pause
          and a last flared promise that new times are coming;
and when they arrive we’ll seem barely to have been here.

A crow slips from the roof, dipping into flight
          beyond a low bush by the front fence and flaps
off across the darkening street
          that needs nothing from this waiting.

The crow is another black bird, of course, and one wonders whether the blackbird of revelation in the other poems might have a darker counterpart here. It would fit in with the balanced quality of this and other poems: after all, day is always followed by night.

At any rate, within the setting of oncoming darkness and storms there is a lot of human darkness. “Storm” makes this clear enough:

. . . . . 
Home with you after our visit to the park
where we recalled two long-ago storm-fallen elms
as children scrambled over every inch of turf,
I know my sister’s heart is in intensive care,
that my brother can’t find a cure for his son,
that though the storm was out to sea last night,
it’s coming at us fast. . .

And there is more darkness in the form of deaths and suicides: “For Henry” and “For You, My Friend” both describe early deaths. A moving poem, “Unmade Day”, describes a morning bike-ride after receiving news by email of a young poet’s suicide. The way the poem is made seems quite distinctive to Brophy – I’d describe it as a quintessentially Brophy poem – in that the ride takes place through the very horizontal world of Brunswick and the darker elements are part of the scene, as the oily canal, the flags and police were in “About Happiness”:

. . . . .
Fists gloved, I cycle three blocks beyond
a youth detention centre’s razor wire,
past scumbled mud where someone’s camped
beneath a blue tarpaulin near a stormwater creek
that goes along by here without a name.

Her father, her mother are without their daughter’s many futures - 
          all untouched untried untitled unspoken.

The possibility of some revelation of another world is always present and provides a vertical perspective but at the horizontal level, all a poet can do is be sensitive to the sufferings of others and, as in “Dawn Song” offer a coin to a homeless man: it’s rejected.