A review of The Dinner Party by Colleen Keating

colleen General, The Dinner Party April 7, 2024April 7, 2024Compulsive Reader, Dr. Beatriz Copello, Magdalena Ball, review of The Dinner Party, The Dinner Party

BOOK REVIEWS, POETRY REVIEWS

A review of The Dinner Party by Colleen Keating

Thank you to Beatriz Copello for her affirming review of The Dinner Party and to Magdalena Ball for her encouragement and her work for publishing of poets in Compulsive Reader

March 19, 2024

Reviewed by Beatriz Copello

The Dinner Party:
A Poetic Response
by Colleen Keating
Ginninderra Press
ISBN: 9781761095306, Paperback, May 2023

Having read and reviewed Colleen Keating’s books Hildegard of Bigen: A Poetic Journey, Olive Muriel Pink: Her Radical and Idealistic Life and The Dinner Party: A Poetic Response, I can say without any doubt that Colleen Keating is not only a brilliant lyric poet but she is also a talented researcher. These three books are about extraordinary women who were mostly ignored in history or just plain forgotten.

The Dinner Party will engage the reader from its first page which explains where the idea from this book was born. Keating explains that “The Dinner Party” is a permanent feminist installation of the artwork of Judy Chicago. This artwork, created in 1978, resides in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Centre for Feminist Art, in the Brooklyn Museum in New York. The poet describes this installation as a large triangular table of 15 metres long set for a banquet for 39 women in memorial recognition to forgotten women, mythical and real from the Western World history. In the introduction to the book the author quotes Judy Chicago who said: “Women have always made a significant contribution to the development of human civilisation, but have been consistently ignored, denied, or trivialised.’’

Keating has divided the sections of the book according to the wings of the triangle of the installation, this is Wing 1: women from prehistory to the Roman Empire, Wing 2: women from the beginnings of Christianity to the Reformation and Wing 3: From the American to the Women’s Revolution.

In The Dinner Party Keating brings to light what for centuries has been ignored: the power and strength of women. Keating resuscitates the experience of women in this book. Her poetry traces the lives of women who demonstrated their influence, broke barriers, gave their lives for others, were oppressed or defied patriarchy.

Line by line the poet weaves a net that captures the reader’s imagination and admiration for both the poetry and for the women honoured in the poems, like in the following extract from the poem titled “Amazon”, for the women who went to battle in the Bronze Age from 1900 and 1200 BCE:

Amidst the battle to affirm women
throughout history
Amazon women
with fierce inner conviction
self-possessed and resolute —
who donned breastplates
even prepared to cut off a breast
to be better archers
were warrior women
stalwart as Mars in the night sky
fiery red and untouchable
always with an extra stone for the sling
an extra arrow for the quiver.

At the end of the poetry Keating provides an extensive list of notes about the poems and the women at the Dinner Party Installation. These notes are well researched and condensed in such a way that the life and work of each woman is evident.

It is difficult to tell stories in poetry while retaining the musicality of the poem. Keating has this skill and creates a rhythm that flows with the lines while simultaneously creating power images of the work’s subjects. Her voice is strong but at the same time is measured and deliberate.

The feminist message contained in “The Dinner Party” by Colleen Keating remind us that poetry has the power to shape consciousness, provoke thought, and incite change. Young women must read this fabulous book and older women also must read it to remind us how strong, powerful and intelligent we are and how for centuries we have been eclipsed by men.

About the reviewer: Dr Beatriz Copello is an award-winning poet, she writes poetry, fiction, reviews and plays. The author’s books are: Women Souls and Shadows, Meditations At the Edge of a Dream, Under the Gums Long Shade, Forbidden Steps Under the Wisteria, A Call to the Stars translated and published in China and Taiwan, Witches Women and Words, No Salami Fairy Bread, Rambles, Renacer en Azul and Lo Irrevocable del Halcon (In Spanish). Copello’s poetry has been published in literary journals such as Southerly and Australian Women’s Book Review and in many feminist publications. The author has participated in international conferences, has taught Creative Writing at W.S.U. and other scholarly institutions, she has read her poetry at Writers Festivals and other poetry events in Australia and overseas. Copello is mentioned amongst the forty “most notable people” graduated from the University of Technology.

REVIEW of The Dinner Party: A poetic response by Denise O’Hagan

colleen General, The Dinner Party February 4, 2024February 7, 2024Denise O'Hagan, Dr. Beatriz Copello, Ginninderra Press, Judy Chicago, Pip Griffin, review of The Dinner Party, The Dinner Party

The Dinner Party: A poetic response by Colleen Keating (Ginninderra Press 2023) reviewed by Denise O’Hagan

. . . we revive your memory

and honour you . . .

You chose to be empowered

before women were visible. (p.46)

These lines, addressed to Marcella of Rome, epitomise the spirit behind Keating’s latest collection, The Dinner party. A poetic response, released by Adelaide-based publisher, Ginninderra Press. During the course of its 144 pages – substantial by poetry book standards – Keating fleshes out some of history’s most gifted and courageous women, rescuing them from the obscurity and oppression to which ‘patriarchy’s wilful effort’ has traditionally consigned them, and restoring them to centre stage.

The book is a poetic response to the iconic art installation by American feminist artist, Judy Chicago (created 1974-1979), of a large triangular dinner table set for, and dramatically commemorating, thirty-nine influential women drawn from history and mythology.

The poet’s attentiveness to the installation is clear: she structures her book into three ‘wings’, representing three eras from the ancient world through to the beginnings of the women’s revolution, each of which is devoted to thirteen women from areas as diverse as the arts and activism to medicine and music.

The women are vividly evoked in all their multilayered complexity. We meet the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, known for her jealous nature as much as for her embodiment of love and fertility, whose

‘honeyed mouth
turns venomous at a whim’,

revolutionary artist Artemisia Gentileschi,
‘a Baroque prescience of women’s advocacy’

who was lost to history for 400 years’ and women rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft, whose voice

‘was a luminous candle
in a darkness of patriarchy.’

These imaginative recreations are complemented by notes on the background of each woman, and a detailed bibliography.

This is a powerful yet sensitive breathing of lyrical life into significant historical women, and an eloquent contribution to feminist literature. As its author points out

’The challenge is ongoing. There are still many injustices enacted against women. Domestic violence is at an all time high.’

The table is set, the dinner party poised to happen – and the book places us on the cusp of what promises to be a spirited dinner party!

I would urge you, the reader, to take up Keating’s invitation to immerse yourself in this remarkable collection and in so doing, honour the women ‘on whose shoulders we stand’.

To purchase The Dinner Party

https://www.ginninderrapress.com.au/store.php?product/page/2891/Colleen+Keating+%2F+The+Dinner+Party%3A+A+poetic+response

or please order from your favourite online seller: print or ebook.

About Denise O’Hagan Editor and writer

Born and raised in Italy, Denise lived in the UK before emigrating to Sydney, Australia.

After completing a Masters in Bibliography and Textual Criticism at Leeds University, she worked as an editor with various publishing houses including Collins, Heinemann and Routledge in London, and Horwitz Educational and Cambridge University Press in Sydney, where she was also consulting editor with the State Library of NSW.

She set up her own imprint Black Quill Press in 2015 to publish her late mother’s books: Jerome & His Women (2015), shortlisted for the Institute of Professional Editors’ Rosanne Fitzgibbon Editorial Award (the ‘Rosie’), and a second revised edition of A Roman Death (2017), originally published by Macmillan. Her poetry is published widely in Australia and internationally. Recipient of the Dalkey Poetry Prize, she has also been shortlisted in various awards including the Australian Catholic University Poetry Prize, the Robert Graves Poetry Prize (UK), the Plough Writing Prize (UK) and the Proverse International Poetry Prize (Hong Kong). She was Poetry Editor for Australia/New Zealand for Irish literary journal The Blue Nib until 2020. Her poetry collections include The Beating Heart (Ginninderra Press 2020), shortlisted for the Society of Women Writers NSW Book Awards 2022, and Anamnesis (Recent Work Press 2022), finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Award (Poetry) 2023 and shortlisted in the International Rubery Book Award (Poetry) 2023.

THE EBOOK AND MAYBE SOME BOOK SALES MAY HAVE THE BOOK WITH THIS COVER.

‘It was the prevailing attitude in the 1960s that women had no history. There were no women’s studies, nothing.’ – Judy Chicago, creator of the iconic art installation The Dinner Party.

‘The Dinner Party by the talented poet Colleen Keating brings to light, through beautiful lyrical poetry, what for centuries has been ignored: the power and strength of women. Very little has been made known about the lives of influential women of the past, as women’s lived experience has been suppressed, even erased from history. In this collection, the poet resuscitates the experience of women from prehistory to women’s twentieth-century revolution. Her poetry traces the lives of women who demonstrated their influence, in every field including philosophy, medicine, writing, art, astronomy, suffragists and justice warriors who fought for recognition. Women who gave their lives, suffered, broke barriers, knocked down walls, smashed glass ceilings, pried open doors, who defied patriarchy in some way for all of us. Still today as women are written into history, the struggle for our reckoning towards equality and respect continues. A must-read book that honours women; women who would not be silent.’ – Dr Beatriz Copello
‘With impeccable research and deep empathy, Colleen Keating continues her powerful poetic contribution to feminist literature with the celebration of thirty-nine of the more than a thousand women forgotten, marginalised or written out of Western history. A remarkable and beautifully imagined work.’ – Pip Griffin
978 1 76109 530 6, 144pp