The Hour of Silvered Mullet by Jean Kent, Pitt Street Poetry, 2015, was launched by Christopher Pollnitz at at Cardiff Library on 11 April 2015.
'Jean and I go back some way, to when the Newcastle Poetry Prize was the Mattara Poetry Prize, and I was coordinating it for the first time. Over the decades we’ve never had a cross word, though on her part there have been kind, perceptive, discriminating words. They’ve been the words of a friend and a very fine poet, whose latest collection of poems—the seventh, counting selections—it’s my pleasure to launch today. Once I might have plumed myself with having ‘discovered’ Jean, but it’s not true. I can claim to having been the first to publish the poems of the South Australian poet novelist, Peter Goldsworthy, but I wasn’t the first to publish one of Jean’s. And there is a larger truth to tell. Editors and reviewers don’t ‘discover’ poets. Good poets discover themselves. Good poets who have long, productive careers—poets like Jean—go on discovering new and larger selves from the multitude of their influences and experiences and memories, and from the stories they hear of others.'
READ ON at http://rochfordstreetreview.com/category/writers/jean-kent/
A good interview with Jean Kent by Brad Evans is available HERE
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