Orpheus in the Undershirt

With Orpheus in the Undershirt, Kevin Densley has produced his best book yet: sharp but not cutting, tart but not cynical, the collection weaves lyric, barb and lament into a marvellous, prickly garment that soothes as it stimulates. Don’t like small, evocative poems as clear and complex as rockpools? Dive into an eight-page outlaw fistfight roaring with dust and despair. Not interested in ‘When Johnstone’s Circus Came to Town’? (Though why wouldn’t you be, with its ‘toupeed ringmaster/in a red lame suit’ and aromatic ‘strong whiff of manure’?) Explore instead the death of a bantam ‘inside the chookhouse/among the warm chooky smells’. Unlike most collections which attempt to blend ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, to find the charge of destiny in the nuts and bolts of the everyday, Orpheus does it effortlessly, without need of gimmicks or creaky, overbearing conceits. Here Kevin Densley fuses the marvels and mundanities of life into a witty, searching collection that sings the subtleties of both. - James Roderick Burns, Other Poetry