Strong, spare, and elegiac poems; a fine collection.
This poetry collection considers memory, family, the body, aging, and loss.
In his first collection, Doggerland: Ancestral Poems (2015), King explored the deep history of family and the Irish. Here, he touches on legend—one section is titled “Mythic”—but locates many poems in personal childhood memory and aging, his parents’ and his own. In “Bird Years,” the titular poem plays with the more expected concept of dog years (the next poem’s title, in fact) to give King’s own age, lending it strangeness: “In man years, I am sixty-seven.” The speaker sees himself as having a precarious hold on existence, like the California condor with which he later identifies. This vulture went extinct in the wild but has been slowly and expensively reintroduced; the poet writes, “More public support is needed / to save me for a little while longer… / I am nearly extinct.” That he compares himself to a vulture, not some more cuddly endangered species, comports with the weary mood that inhabits many poems in this collection. Several pieces reflect on parental decline but also decline in the speaker’s generation. In “Mouth,” for example, the speaker writes of himself and siblings: “We are wary—listening to Tom, / our weary brother, the reliquary,” his sawlike words “working the lean hindquarter / of our childhood.” Here, with the speaker’s caution and resistance alongside Tom’s weary work, age isn’t a time of retirement and rest but of increasing labor. Tom becomes a kind of archaeologist as the siblings talk; “on a last late night of excavation, / he makes a deep wound deeper while the wives sleep / —digs at our new, our long dead.” But beside all this difficult work is the poem’s lilt, as with wary/weary/reliquary. This hints interestingly at the speaker’s Irish background (also underlined by “reliquary”), Ireland being a country marked by both struggle and poetry. Forgetting takes on an ambiguous role as loss and protection from the past; the book’s final poem ends with elephants peacefully forgetting something their mahouts bitterly contest.
Strong, spare, and elegiac poems; a fine collection.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Mayapple Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.
Heidish (A Misplaced Woman, 2016, etc.) presents an account of St. Francis of Assisi’s life, as told from his father’s perspective in poetic form.
St. Francis is known as a saint who believed in living the Gospel, gave sermons to birds, and tamed a wolf. Over the course of 84 poems, Heidish tells her own fictionalized version of the saint’s journey. In his youth, Francesco is an apprentice of his father, Pietro Bernardone, a fabric importer. The boy is a sensitive dreamer and nature lover who sees “natural holiness in every living thing.” As an adult, Francesco decides to pursue knighthood, but God warns him to “Go back, child / Serve the master.” He joins the Church of San Damiano, steals his father’s storeroom stock, and sells it to rebuild the church. His furious father chains him in the cellar, and the bishop orders Francesco to repay the debt. Afterward, father and son stop speaking to each other; Francesco becomes a healer of the sick and a proficient preacher. After failing to broker a peace agreement during wartime, Francesco falls into depression and resigns his church position. He retreats to the mountains and eventually dies; it’s only then that Pietro becomes a true follower of St. Francis: “You are the father now and I the son / learning still what it means to be a saint,” he says. Heidish’s decision to tell this story from Pietro’s perspective is what makes this oft-told legend seem fresh again. She uses superb similes and metaphors; for example, at different points, she writes that St. Francis had eyes like “lit wicks” and a spirit that “shone like a clean copper pot.” In another instance, she describes the Church of San Damiano as a place in which “walls crumbled / like stale dry bread.” Following the poems, the author also offers a thorough and engaging historical summary of the real life of St. Francis, which only adds further context and depth to the tale.
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9905262-1-6
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Dolan & Associates
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.
A debut volume of poetry explores love and war.
Divided into four sections, Osaki’s book covers vast emotional territories. Section 1, entitled “Walking Back the Cat,” is a reflection on youthful relationships both familial and romantic. “Dying Arts,” the second part, is an examination of war and its brutal consequences. But sections three and four, named “Tradecraft” and “Best Evidence” respectively, do not appear to group poems by theme. The collection opens with “My Father Holding Squash,” one of Osaki’s strongest poems. It introduces the poet’s preoccupation with ephemera—particularly old photographs and letters. Here he describes a photo that is “several years old” of his father in his garden. Osaki muses that an invisible caption reads: “Look at this, you poetry-writing / jackass. Not everything I raise is useless!” The squash is described as “bearable fruit,” wryly hinting that the poet son is considered somewhat less bearable in his father’s eyes. Again, in the poem “Photograph,” Osaki is at his best, sensuously describing a shot of a young woman and the fleeting nature of that moment spent with her: “I know only that I was with her / in a room years ago, and that the sun filtering / into that room faded instantly upon striking the floor.” Wistful nostalgia gives way to violence in “Dying Arts.” Poems such as “Preserve” present a battleground dystopia: “Upturned graves and craters / to swim in when it rains. / Small children shake skulls / like rattles, while older ones carve rifles / out of bone.” Meanwhile, “Silver Star” considers the act of escorting the coffin of a dead soldier home, and “Gun Song” ruminates on owning a weapon to protect against home invasion. The language is more jagged here but powerfully unsettling nonetheless. The collection boasts a range of promising poetic voices, but they do not speak to one another, a common pitfall found in debuts. “Walking Back the Cat” is outstanding in its refined attention to detail; the sections following it read as though they have been produced by two or more other poets. Nevertheless, this is thoughtful, timely writing that demands further attention.
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984198-32-7
Page Count: 66
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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