Ring the Bells

TURNING GREAT & SMALL EVENTS INTO POETRY: BEATRIZ COPELLO REVIEWS ‘RING THE BELLS’ BY COLLEEN KEATING

colleen Poetry , , ,

 

TURNING GREAT & SMALL EVENTS INTO POETRY: BEATRIZ COPELLO REVIEWS ‘RING THE BELLS’ BY COLLEEN KEATING

by

Ring the Bells by Colleen Keating, Ginninderra Press 2025

With great enthusiasm I read Colleen Keating lastest book Ring the Bells because I am aware that she is a brilliant writer. I was not disappointed, this book rings many bells, and each of them touches a part of the reader’s heart and soul. Let me tell you why …

Ring the Bells contains an ‘Introduction’ and four sections titled ‘Embracing Light’, ‘Dark’, ‘Life’ and ‘Love’. In the Introduction the poet explains that bells are significant to her because she loves the idea that ringing bells signify times of joy.

‘Embracing Light’, is a section of the book in which Keating turns the great and small events of life like love, death, drinking coffee in an old cup, or the mystery of a moth into poetry. With enlightening words the poet finds one good thing in the darkest of events. Like in the following poem titled: “resurrection” (the poet did not use capitals letters as a good post-post poet.)

from the dark mysterious swamp
thick with paperbarks lantana and lilies

like a freight train cutting
through air in a country town

closer like individual carriages
clanking past

closer still. Rumbling
breaking into distinctive croaks

yes the swamp is thickly alive
with a merriment of frogs

a bass chorus carousing courting
chatting all excited to have ascended

with the rain
from an underbelly secret world

What a poetic metaphor! What a message! We must look for ‘that good thing’ that hides in the darkest of times and places. Yes! Look for ‘that good thing’.

Another of Keating’s skills is the way she poetically describes art, or a Norham Castle, or plants, ferns, mossy outcrops or lanterns of red fuchsias.

It excited me to know that Keating has a close relationship with tress like I do; yes! Think what you like but trees talk to me! In Keating’s case she is invited to caress them, like she describes in the following poem titled “my oracle”:

i visit a special tree
a regular confidante
and ponder
what this new year may bring

rooted in place
sturdy strong
calm today
it gazes upwards
and out over the valley
as if it could see
far beyond our horizon
one thing was different

last visit its trunk was pink
sleek inviting my hand to run
across its smooth dimply skin
today its trunk. Rough
its bark splitting shedding
peeling in strips and curls
burnished as a rusty drum
exposing chartreuse rawness
i square my shoulders stand tall
nod understanding
and thank tree wisdom
for its perfect message

The poem in this section of the book reminds me that bells ring in nature like in the hum of bees, the laugh of children, the rain or rocks rolling in a river.

In the second part of Ring The Bells the poet’s creativity is not only evident in her words but also in the style and settings of her poems. In this section we encounter poems about war and other maladies like the abuse of earth and children as well as reflections on how nowadays life impacts us.

It is obvious from the third section of the book titled ‘Embracing Life’ that the poet loves and breathes nature. Each moment in time close to nature the poet turns it into an epiphany. I hope dear reader that you don’t assume that Ring The Bells only contain inspirational and serious poems, no you will find humour as well.

The last section of the book ‘Embracing love’ is very deep and poignant. Keating introduces the chapter with the following tercet:

with family all around
my heart reaches out
to the one missing

I could say so much about this section which with beautiful and inspiring poetry expresses many philosophical thoughts and makes us realise that even with the death of someone we love we can find comfort in even perhaps the simplest of things like smelling flowers in a garden.

Colleen Keating is among the most illustrious and excellent writers and poets, it was an honour for me to review her book. Beautiful, inspirational, true to life, I enjoyed reading every poem. I highly recommend buying and reading Ring the Bells.

 – Beatriz Copello

Dr Beatriz Copello is a well-known reviewer, writer and poet, she is also known for her sense of humour. “Her poems are sensuous, evocative and imaginative. Beatriz Copello is one of Australia’s foremost poets,” wrote Julia Hancock, Ex-Editor of Allan and Unwin and Freelance editor and journalist. Copello’s poetry books are Women Souls and Shadows, Meditations at the Edge of a Dream, Flowering Roots, Under the Gums Long Shade, Lo Irrevocable del Halcon and Renacer en Azul (In Spanish), Witches Women and Words, Rambles and No Salami Fairy Bread. Her poetry has been published in literary journals such as Southerly and Australian Women’s Book Review and in many other print and Electronic Publications. Fiction books by author are: A Call to the Stars, Forbidden Steps Under the Wisteria and Beyond the Moons of August (Her Doctoral Thesis). 

Ring the Bells by Colleen Keating is available from https://ginninderrapress.com.au/ product/ring-the-bells-b/

 

 

Libby Hathorn in conversation with Colleen Keating will launch Colleen’s poetry book,

colleen Poetry , ,

Guest Speaker

Colleen Keating: Ring the Bells – Book Launch

Power of Poetry
Libby Hathorn in conversation with Colleen Keating will  launch Colleen’s poetry book,

Ring the Bells. 

In Ring the Bells, award-winning poet Colleen Keating invites readers to listen closely – to the chimes of joy, the tolls of grief and the quiet notes of love that echo through our shared human experience.

Moving through four sections – Embracing Light, Embracing Dark, Embracing Life, Embracing Love – her poems ring with an acute awareness of the world’s beauty and its brokenness.

From intimate moments in nature to the great sweep of history and current events, Keating’s lyrical voice finds hope, tenderness and resilience in the spaces where light filters through the cracks.

Colleen Keating has published eight books of poetry including the best-selling Hildegard of Bingen: A Poetic journey (Ginninderra Press 2019)

She has won numerous awards, and her poems have been published both nationally and internationally. Her writing explores the paradox and wonder of nature, the realities of life, equality, justice and the increasing threat to our natural environment.

Colleen writes on Ku-ring-gai land in Sydney and Darkinjung land on the Central Coast.

 

 

Ring the Bells by Colleen Keating: A Review

colleen General, Poetry, Ring the Bells , , , ,

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

 

Ring the Bells by Colleen Keating. Published by Ginninderra Press

colleen General, Poetry , , , ,

 

Finally it is here. To be published on the 20th August 2025. The countdown is on.

I will have copies to sell very soon. Send your address  to me via message or email. I will give you my  BSB

– $ 20 plus  postage and when Ring the Bells arrives  I will send it immediately.

Email me     taichi@bigpond.net.au

Writing this poetry over the past few years and compiling Ring the Bells has been my antidote to these times we live in 

and I hope it is an antidote for you too.

 

 

______________________________________________________________________________________

Ring the Bells is a collection of new poetry

with an invitation to hear each poem

as a bell chime embracing light, dark, life and love – cyclic like the seasons.

 

In Ring the Bells, award-winning poet Colleen Keating

invites readers to listen closely —

to the chimes of joy,

the tolls of grief,

and the quiet notes of love

that echo through our shared human experience.

 

Moving through four sections —

Embracing Light,

Embracing Dark,

Embracing Life,

and Embracing Love — her poems ring with an acute awareness

of the world’s beauty and its brokenness.

 

From intimate moments in nature

to the great sweep of history and current events,

Keating’s lyrical voice finds hope, tenderness, and resilience

in the spaces where light filters through the cracks.

the temple bell stops –
but the sound keeps coming 
out of the flowers

Basho (1644-94)
(trans by Robert Bly)

Piercingly beautiful. Each poem a chime 

 

                                            embracing light

 

                                                          embracing dark

 

                                                                                embracing life

 

                                                                                                      embracing love

 

from a poet with a vibrant and curious mind in love with life..