Poetry
Five Bells: XX Poems
Kenneth Slessor · 1939
Synopsis
Twenty poems, all unpublished. The first, which gives the book its title, shows a man at his window at night, listening beyond Sydney harbour to a ship's whistle, the seabirds and five strokes of a bell; he seeks the voice of Joe, his friend drowned in the harbour, whom memory gives back to him only in fragments, without bringing him back. The other pieces range from sleep to the last trams, from William Street to a country in the north and a country in the south, from a tribute to Hugh McCrae to the evensong of the Reverend Samuel Marsden.
Context
The collection was published in 1939 in Sydney by Frank Johnson, in forty-three pages printed in five hundred copies, with drawings by Norman Lindsay. The opening poem, written from August 1935 to January 1937, mourns the cartoonist Joe Lynch, a friend of the author, who fell from a ferry in the harbour. The Sydney Morning Herald praised the poet's rhythmic precision, and the red page of the Bulletin distinguished his light pieces from his serious poems. John Olsen drew a painting from the poem in 1963 and then, in 1973, a mural for the foyer of the Sydney Opera House concert hall.
Who it is for
Forty-three pages and twenty poems in English; a selection of the work appeared in French in 1990 under the title Visiteurs de la terre.
Prizes and reception
According to a 2017 study, the title poem is the most frequently reprinted in national anthologies, present in all but one between 1946 and 2011.
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