A startlingly intuitive new poet—one to watch.
Pearson’s masterfully observant debut poetry collection scours littoral and urban landscapes.
“The Sandpiper’s Spell” is a six-part poem and epilogue that in its simplest interpretation is a walk along a beach to a forest. The poet becomes a beachcomber, picking out aesthetically pleasing images from the coastline: the way the “waning tide has left / a crescent of cooler sand” or the pattern of “red orange pine needles / cross hatching the ground.” The collection is structured so that each part of “The Sandpiper’s Spell” is followed by a series of short poems that briefly transport the reader away from the coastal setting before returning to the shoreline to continue the journey. Childhood stands out as a recurrent theme. “Circus World” remembers “evaporating in a midday haze / on a back corner of childhood / the tree we climbed and stayed / past dark” and also that progressive loss of innocence, “you who kissed me / hard on the mouth / when we were both ten,” which leads inevitably to adulthood, where faded mementos of youth are all that remain, “still hanging in a corner / a netless basketball hoop.” Other poems, like “Death of a...” leave the serenity of the ocean for a bustling city where a pedestrian is about to take a fatal step into the street. Pearson’s work—which rapidly shifts through a gamut of psychological states—is a welcome reminder that reading poetry is a vigorous mental activity. Poems such as “Day Dreams” showcase Pearson’s ability to create striking imagery. Here, he effortlessly morphs shoreline detritus into clever caricature: “white bubbles button / his fish face / to his man body / an inverted voyeur / the bleached bones / of his ship / wrecked.” As the collection progresses, the poetry becomes more clipped, abstract, and urgent but no less powerful: “nimbus / blood candy sky / sand in stone /snow on mountain / crimson salt bleeding rivers from / under the mountain’s petticoat.” Both vastly panoramic and deeply introspective, Pearson’s writing explores both the wonders of nature and the shifting landscape of the human mind.
A startlingly intuitive new poet—one to watch.Pub Date: March 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9995951-2-1
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Buen Parto Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A substantive, streamlined look at early Christian poetry and music.
A debut book provides a blend of scholarship and creative translation focusing on Christianity’s formative years.
Though contemporary Christians of all types are used to singing hymns in church, the praise song has a history in the Judeo-Christian tradition going back perhaps four millennia, existing in the earliest biblical texts; scholars find it in the first Psalms, Exodus, and arguably even Genesis. Glendinning offers a sturdy contribution to this tradition in these new English renderings of Christian hymns from the Middle Ages. Some are reworked from Latin originals by giants of the ecclesiastical tradition; Thomas Aquinas is here, as are Abelard, Ambrose, and Bonaventura. Others come from dimmer stars in the pantheon, among them Fulbert of Chartres, Marbod of Rennes, and Alan of Lille. But each of these verses earns its place in this volume. Here is the end of a lauds song by Aquinas: “O Lamb of God, salvation’s grace, / That opens for us Heaven’s door, / We know the throes that all must face, / O bide with us, our strength restore!” And here is a piercing stanza from the lesser-known Paulinus of Aquileia: “Like teeming olive trees of God, the two, / A candelabrum’s fervent arms of gold, / Two luminaries lighting Heaven’s sky, / They loose and cast aside the chains of sin, / Unlock the gates of Paradise anew.” Glendinning is right to point out that both of these passages—along with many others in this valuable, satisfying compendium—engage a common theme: the urge to “prepare one’s soul for eternity.” And this shared concern acts as a narrow ribbon lacing together these 40-odd poems from roughly 1,000 years of religious history. But as remarkable as Glendinning’s work as a translator is, the academic writing here is even more impressive. In an extended introduction and brief prefaces to each set of hymns, the author presents historical context, formal analysis, and his own translation theory. Even better, he rolls out all this worthy material without the unnecessarily complicated jargon that mars many similar scholarly volumes.
A substantive, streamlined look at early Christian poetry and music.Pub Date: March 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4602-4977-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The mirror, as a subject, has a long history in world poetry. There’s Shakespeare’s third sonnet: “Look in thy glass and...
Reflective poetry that shows readers a bit of themselves.
The mirror, as a subject, has a long history in world poetry. There’s Shakespeare’s third sonnet: “Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest / Now is the time that face should form another”; there’s also Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror” and John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” whose curved surface “chose to reflect only what he saw.” In debut author Kellett’s soulful, similarly themed “Between the Mirrors,” the title poem of this accomplished new collection, one sees a figure between two reflections: “I can see my profiles before me and behind, / both receding and approaching. / They come from the past and the future— / so many reflections yet to come, / so many having gone before.” In all of these mirror poems, the reflective surface is an apt metaphor for poetry itself; it yields glimpses into a realm of existence somewhere between presence and absence, being and seeming, reality and illusion. Kellett effectively plumbs this liminal space in a number of his verses. In “Memories,” for instance, one sees fleeting images of those one has half-forgotten: “They reappear after a while, and then they’re gone, / slipping out of mind like a jacket tried on in a shop.” Later, in “The Fourteenth of September,” one hears of other mysterious presences: “What is this? It cannot simply be physical / as though dimension and materials are all it is. / Yes it is hefted, shifted and checked to see if it’s true and sound, / but it must be more than that to leave such marks.” Few poets can make such abstractions feel so concrete, but Kellett manages nicely. In “Memories,” for example, he ties those spectral forms to a physical object that’s both familiar and foreign: a jacket that isn’t one’s own. In “Fourteenth,” he pulls off a similar feat but with heavy verbs: “hefted,” “shifted,” and “checked” connote weight and allow him to tie down an otherwise mysterious “this.” His pen is a razor that he pushes through fog, and one can only marvel that it cuts so well.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5144-6364-2
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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