A far-reaching, rambunctious collection.
Badgett (Rock Dust, 2010, etc.) exhibits impressive artistic range, under a single tent assembling poetry simple and complex, flash fiction, a short dramatic piece and a selection of graphic art including woodcut, collage and photography.
Of the many subjects that inspire Badgett’s fervid and often biting pen—among them ideology and celebrity, intellectualism and authenticity, epistemological puzzles, identity formation and social pressure—none provoke more tender and authentic responses from him than the lives and work of coal miners, a topic he approaches with directness rarely on display elsewhere in the collection. Much like Gary Snyder’s poetry on loggers, Badgett’s miner poems are concrete and unembellished, all the more reverent for their simplicity. Writing about the 1981 Dutch Creek No. 1 mine explosion that killed 15 miners, Badgett honors the men’s unremarkable final moments, emphasizing the looming tragedy through repeated progressive tense verbs: “Waiting to descend / Into the hole, joking / Squinting at the sun / Having a smoke /… / Staring at muddy boots / Daydreaming.” Badgett’s interest in tangible, lived moments takes a Wordsworth-ian turn in “On the Flattops,” in which the narrator alludes to but also deflects attention from an ambiguous moment—perhaps ecstatic, perhaps violent. Instead, he focuses on the landscape and its psychic effects: a “sea breeze blows across this rolling world of / mountain grasses // Over there—at the far end of a long echo / That gash of pink and bone-white limestone” and “These skunk cabbages, these wild / geraniums and pearly everlastings! // We shall walk these windswept hills, / walk these fields in quiet gladness.” Social commentary pervades much of the poetry, as in “Class We Bring Good News,” in which students are taught that “You are meaningless / Machines / You are accidental animals” and then encouraged to “Reach / For the stars / Follow your dream.” The collection takes on an increasingly surreal tone, juxtaposing pop culture and historical images with Badgett’s personal visions, finally culminating in the absurdist, Beckett-inspired drama, “Nothing Fails to Amaze Me,” which features, among other oddities, a scene of five minutes of silence broken up only by 10 seconds of flashing lights. While his more surreal work is so idiosyncratic as to resist general evaluation, Badgett has an undeniable gift for imbuing the most mundane scenes and landscapes with deep, and often dangerous, psychic implications that endow his poetry with a surprising and rewarding psychological profundity.
A far-reaching, rambunctious collection.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499541755
Page Count: 100
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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