A review of Ring the Bells by Colleen Keating

Reviewed by Roslyn McFarland

Ring the Bells
by Colleen Keating
Ginninderra Press
August 2025, Paperback, 108 pages, ISBN: 9781761097157

Ring the Bells is Colleen Keating’s eighth published book of poetry, which is quite an achievement in itself. This is a delightful collection – often thought provoking, sometimes poignant and always engaging. Keating understands the times in which we live. As she says in her introduction, it is: ‘a broken world with personal and collective emotions, pain of war and human travail that can bring us to our knees’. But gloom and desperation aren’t options for this fine lyric poet. Her title Ring the Bells comes from the chorus of Leonard Cohen’s song, ‘Anthem’:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

This effectively signposts that the poems which follow will not only preference hope and positivity over cynicism and despair, but will also elucidate her expressed notion that the ‘beauty of nature and grace of humanity is our balm’.

Ring the Bells has been cleverly curated into four sections, each a kind of bell chime: Embracing light, Embracing dark, Embracing life and lastly, Embracing love. In all four parts, it’s easy to see Keating’s deft and often delicate lyricism at work. Her powerful sensory imagery is derived from the intensity of her gaze upon the ordinary and the extraordinary, which for me is beautifully captured in ‘the visit’, with its close attention to detail and the allusion to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, ‘The Windhover’.

And while many of the poems in this volume reflect Keating’s enduring sense of wonder and awe found within the natural world, there are many more that demonstrate the depth of her concern about our planet’s fragility, as well as social inequality and injustice of all kinds. While her poetic voice is always gentle and compassionate, her subjects range from bush fires, earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria, the plight of refugees, mass shootings in US schools, COVID, the war in Ukraine and the injustice levelled at our first nations people – their dispossession, the deaths in custody, the shame felt in knowing the truth of our nation’s history. Among her poems about love of family, death, loss and grief there are meditations on everyday experience as in ‘while doing a grocery shop’. And in ‘shared umbrella’, the simplicity and concision of the Zen-like revelation found here is clearly affecting:

so much is gained
by

a shared umbrella
with

synchronicity
of gait

besides the intimacy
of leaning in

In this and in several other poems, Keating displays not only her acute observation skills but also her fondness for minimalist Japanese forms. That said, there are poems that show her critical eye and also underscore her willingness to experiment with form. Especially notable is ‘intrusion’ where she satirises the relentless negativity of the news cycle in a style that reminded me of some of Bruce Dawe’s poems.

But there’s always a lightness of touch in all of Colleen Keating’s work. Especially noticed in the deeply personal, final poem ‘Celtic Knots’, which also epitomises her overall message of the power of love. Its structure of 14 non-rhyming couplets metaphorically reinforces the weaving together of form and function. It’s springtime in London, and Keating’s eight year old granddaughter is teaching her to draw a Celtic Knot – that well-known symbol of eternity and interconnectedness of all things:

Our paths have crossed only four times since I helped
my daughter bring her into the world. But our bond

twines like a Celtic Knot even though our connecting
is mostly two screens quavering over FaceTime.

Aware of her own ageing, the poet’s mood becomes contemplative and downcast:

I won’t be here when the lessons coil like snakes
and she learns that beginnings become endings.

I won’t be here to remind her that endings are beginnings.

But a few lines later:

Again my daughter calls us outside to the garden to watch
two fledgling balls of feathers fluttering in the apple tree

We three stand, entwined arm in arm. Endings
seem far away.

There are many such little aperçus like this one throughout this wonderful suite of poems,  which made reading Ring the Bells such a delight for me. And I know I shall be dipping into its pages again and again.

About the reviewer: Roslyn McFarland is a fiction writer, poet and essayist, living in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, on the traditional lands of the Darug and Gandangara peoples. Having spent a great deal of her time in France and as a lover of the arts, she was naturally drawn to the colourful life of the Australian WWII artist, Stella Bowen. The result is Foreign Attachments, her second novel, published late 2024. Her first novel, All the Lives We’ve Lived was also published by Ginninderra Press in 2019. While her novella, The Privacy of Art, was a Bronze Medal Winner in 2016 Global ebook Awards. Roslyn has an MA in Creative Writing from UTS, and her poems, short stories, essays and reviews have appeared in various print and online platforms. She is currently working on a suite of short stories. https://www.roslynmcfarland.com