Unpretentiously revelatory poetry that hums a comforting, melodic tune through the night, heralding the arrival of a new day.
Unaffected and affirmative lyric poetry on cycles of aging, death, and rebirth.
In her aptly titled new collection, Stevens (Sirens’ Songs, 2011, etc.) offers poetry true to the best qualities of the nocturne tradition—atmospheric, tranquil, dusky, and musical verses—while inflecting it with an undeniably American optimism. “Night is moving across the country,” she concedes, and soon, the lands will be “engulfed in charcoal twilight / darker than mud in long-tilled fields.” But, she writes, this is no cause for fear, for this is a “comforting darkness” that descends like “the most gentle, the most tender caress.” Setting the tone for the rest of the volume, the eponymous opening poem reinterprets the dread promise of twilight as an invitation to rest and reflection, a space for quiet contemplation and conversation with familiar shadows. In this vein, the poem concludes with the unusual invocation: “Let night cover the country: / let soft, shrouding darkness soothe, cradle, heal. / Let the night be long.” Though wise, Stevens’ narrators are still prone to their own fears of the dark and cold. Trapped without electricity by an early snow, they hide “fears of a winter // worse than any, a season / forever-long. / Its frost could freeze us blind, // shroud us in mist with / no escape.” And when, in “Ugly April,” a late freeze strikes, the narrator personalizes and embodies the damage, noting that “at a dark and early hour, / those soft, pink magnolia petals / brown, fade, shrivel, fall. / They rest on cold ground—hundreds, / too many to number. They resemble / pale shards of torn flesh.” They courageously celebrate opportunities for phantasmal visitations—whether encountering a “decade-dead friend” and a “two-decades dead husband” on the side of the road or remembering a “mother’s voice / on the phone, louder than usual, / as if to bridge invisible distance”—but fail in courage when confronted by a terminally ill friend: “the terrible odor of her mortality escapes her mouth. // It carries charnel fear. We smell it. Our words falter.” They are, in short, fully and beautifully human, frightened and frail, but endowed with faith, hope, and vision.
Unpretentiously revelatory poetry that hums a comforting, melodic tune through the night, heralding the arrival of a new day.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-938144-31-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: BrickHouse Books, Inc.
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.
Keridan’s poetry testifies to the pain of love and loss—and to the possibility of healing in the aftermath.
The literary critic Geoffrey Hartman once wrote that literature—and poetry, in particular—can help us “read the wound” of trauma. That is, it can allow one to express and explain one’s deepest hurts when everyday language fails. Keridan appears to have a similar understanding of poetry. She writes in “Foreword,” the opening work of her debut collection, that “pain frequently uses words as an escape route / (oh, how I know).” Many words—and a great deal of pain—escape in this volume, but the result is healing: “the ending is happy / the beginning was horrific / so let’s start there.” The book, then, tracks the process of recovery in the wake of suffering, and often, this suffering is brought on by romantic relationships gone wrong. An early untitled poem opens, “I die a little / taking pieces of me to feed the fire / that keeps him warm / you don’t notice that it’s a slow death / when you’re disappearing little by little.” The author’s imagery here—of the self fueling the dying fire of love—is simultaneously subtle and wrenching. But the poem’s message, amplified elsewhere in the book, is clear: We go wrong if we destructively give ourselves over to others, and healing comes only when we turn our energies back to our own good. Later poems, therefore, reveal that self-definition often equals strength. The process is painful but salutary; when “you’re left unprotected / surrounded by chaos with nothing you / can depend on / except yourself / and that’s when you gather the pieces / of the life you lost / and use them to build the life you want.” The “life you want” is an elusive goal, and the author knows that the path to self-definition is fraught with peril—but her collection may give strength to those who walk it.
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72770-538-6
Page Count: 196
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Downbeat but often engaging poems and stories.
A slim volume of largely gay-themed writings with pessimistic overtones.
Poe (Simple Simon, 2013, etc.) divides this collection of six short stories and 34 poems into five sections: “Art,” “Death,” “Relationship,” “Being,” and “Reflection.” Significantly, a figurative death at the age of 7 appears in two different poems, in which the author uses the phrase “a pretended life” to refer to the idea of hiding one’s true nature and performing socially enforced gender roles. This is a well-worn trope, but it will be powerful and resonant for many who have struggled with a stigmatized identity. In a similar vein, “Imaginary Tom” presents the remnants of a faded relationship: “Now we are imaginary friends, different in each other’s thoughts, / I the burden you seek to discard, / you the lover I created from the mist of longing.” Once in a while, short story passages practically leap off of the page, such as this evocative description of a seedy establishment in Lincoln, Nebraska: “It was a dimly lit bar that smelled of rodent piss, with barstools that danced on uneven legs and made the patrons wonder if they were drunker than they thought.” In “Valéry’s Ride,” Poe examines the familial duties that often fall to unmarried and childless people, keeping them from forming meaningful bonds with others. In this story, after the double whammy of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hits Louisiana, Valéry’s extended family needs him more than ever; readers will likely root for the gay protagonist as he makes the difficult decision to strike out on his own. Not all of Poe’s main characters are gay; the heterosexual title character in “Mrs. Calumet’s Workspace,” for instance, pursues employment in order to escape the confines of her home and a passionless marriage. Working as a bookkeeper, she attempts to carve out a space for herself, symbolized by changes in her work area. Still, this story echoes the recurring theme of lives unlived due to forces often beyond one’s control.
Downbeat but often engaging poems and stories.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5168-3693-2
Page Count: 120
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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