A tremendous volume of poems that will illuminate and linger.
King muses on physical and ancestral connections in his debut collection of poems.
The book’s title refers to a now-submerged landmass that connected Great Britain to Northern Europe until about 6500 B.C. King uses this “verdant tundra hunted and fished by ancient peoples” as a metaphor for the unseen bridge that connects each person to his or her hereditary past. For King, this leads to the West of Ireland, where one of his forbears was the newspaperman and storyteller James Berry. With echoes of his ancestor, as well as midcareer Seamus Heaney, King explores family and folk history side by side, all the way back to bog bodies, Neanderthal skeletons, and primordial fish. Showcasing an obsession for color and texture, plants and landscapes, he teases at the unknowable nature of the deep past in his mostly short poems, which often bear deceptively simple titles. In “Gods,” he writes, “Much in those first few / hundred thousand years was slowly new.” He contrasts the gradual, painstaking evolution of nearly every object and place with the evanescent nature of individual understanding; for his narrators, this is a cause of much muted sorrow and bemused joy. Overall, the poems are as worn and wondrous as the ocean floor where Doggerland now rests. King is equally adept at brilliant phonetic stanzas and concentrated verse essays. In “Uncles,” for example, the semantic meaning barely registers above the rhythm: “Augustinians, schooled / in Salamanca, smuggled / to the strand at Inisfail, / their father’s lugger / under half-sail, two / great prow lug sails / finding the wind.” In “Unsettled,” he delivers an entire ethnography in 10 lines: “Imagining ourselves / done with migration, we / imagined ourselves / done, not loosed. // We did not flow or go easy / We made such enemies / in our heads it pleased us / to name them // and give their antitheses / the names of gods.” King is a Boston native, but his collection is a must-read for devotees of the last half-century of Irish verse. The poems have few easy endings and rarely a dull line; they terminate where they need to, but the collection itself concludes far too soon.
A tremendous volume of poems that will illuminate and linger.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0977842971
Page Count: 94
Publisher: Off the Grid Press
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2015
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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