From Dylan To Denis

Paul Kelly has found song inspiration in the works of poets, including one of ours.

- Russell Baillie

As he straps on his guitar, Paul Kelly ponders the tricky bits of his new song. “There’s fresh paint on this one,” he says with a grin. “I’ve just got to get all the kwardles and the oodles and the ardles and the dardles and the doodles right.” And then he’s off, singing about Tom and Elizabeth and the farm and that avian chorus of The Magpies, the touchstone New Zealand poem by Denis Glover.

Aptly, Kelly has rendered the rural tale into a toe-tapping country tune. It’s all part of a phase the veteran Aussie is going through – turning poems into songs. Kelly started a few years back with a project of song-ifying Shakespeare’s sonnets. Now, with his new and 24th studio album, Nature, he’s put tunes behind works by Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Philip Larkin, Walt Whitman and Gerard Manley Hopkins, plus songs derived from his own poems.

The onomatopoeic Glover poem, though, is for a festival show where Kelly adapts poems featuring birds into songs to be performed with a classical trio. There’ll be Aussie black cockatoos rubbing feathers with English finches. And, it’s hoped Glover’s (estate permission pending), “because it will be good to have a New Zealand poem”.