One Eye'd Leigh

How to achieve intense clarity and simplicity without being cool? Too cool? By keeping close to the event-moment, by staying with yourself, by not raising your voice? These poems have great clarity and simplicity. Most of them speak simply from the poet's 'I', and 'I' that observes intensely, is intimate with its own sensibility and illuminates ordinary events with arresting imagery:
A young man looks at the sea, and at me,
with big dog-eyes
and then leaves. Identical twins arrive
very thin, like two halves of one person.
Kilalea bestows on the objects, weathers and people of a single poem equal imagination ao that the worlds of these vignettes are uncannily alive. Such a vision can risk the arch or the facetious and in the poem 'Recycled Small Boys' she only just heads that risk off.
The most striking feature of this writing is its sure-footedness, its effortlessness - this is probably attributable to a simplicity and modesty of scope. There are no contrivances, no striving for effects, no trying out the experiments of others, weird lay-outs etc. The poet has complete authority over each poem.
At first I wondered about the coolness of the tone; for continuous cool easily becomes inconsequential:
Good bye is a curving shape
like a sickle
or a cow's lick
or the way of ironing
a wrinkled shirt flat. Goodbye
is a grip gone slack.
I'm not sure.
In fact a number of poems, particularly later poems, are charged with a sadness that speaks simply for itself with the same unflinching clarity of poems in neutral: 'I cycled through the days we'd spent together'; 'grey was my breath