Kate Llewellyn AM x Adelaide Chamber Singers

Poet and memoirist Kate Llewellyn AM is known for her diary-like narratives that reflect on human intimacies, travel and the solace found in gardening. For Inner Sanctum, Llewellyn has written a poem titled Faith (2023), which she describes as being like ‘the evening news’, adding further:

I feel it is as if the narrator held a microphone to the last few centuries and caught drifts of thoughts from others (humble or famous), scraps of a song from children, weather reports, letters the postman brought, ageing, the life of the soul; all the large and small things that make a life.

In Faith, we find Llewellyn sitting in her garden under an olive tree, pondering questions of faith and inner resolve – what it might mean to have a spiritual life in the contemporary present. A map of the garden by artist Geoff Wilson shows the carefully arranged garden, which also provides shelter. The poet is caught in reveries of her own life, the lives she has watched, the nursery rhymes of children and the horrors of plagues and pandemics, then and now, and those moments of reflection that strike when we least expect them.

Composer Anne Cawrse has also adapted Llewellyn’s poem into a choral work performed by members of the Adelaide Chamber Singers.

Credits

Adelaide Chamber Singers
Christie Anderson, Artistic Director & Conductor
Anne Cawrse, Composer
Jakub Gaudasinski, Sound & Recording Engineer
Max Mackinnon, Film Director