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Brigit Pegeen Kelly is a notable American poet - a
finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Her colelction Song was first
published in1995 and The Orchard
in 2004, by Boa Editions, New York. Carcanet publish them for the first time
in this excellent edition. I've read some of her poems in magazines across
the years, but have been meaning to read the books for some time since they
have been heavily recommended by a friend and fellow writer. It's certainly
been worth the wait; this is a really terrific book of poems.
Dream-like, surreal, disquieting, defamiliarising - these are all apposite
adjectives for the poems in Song
- which explore both the beauty and underbelly of the natural world and 'Our
own genius for harm'. Lyrically rich and resourceful, musically assured, and
dazzlingly intense - these are some other qualities all the poems possess.
Pegeen Kelly treats nature with a peculiar (one of her favourite words)
idiosyncratic syntax, mining a strange semantic seam. 'Of Ancient Origins and
War' begins:
And briefly
stay, the junketing sparrows, briefly
Briefly,
their flurries like small wine spills,
while the one
divides into two: the heart and its shadow,
The world and
its threat, the crow back of the sparrow.
While 'Distraction of Fish and Flowers in the Kill' begins:
People fish
the kills here. Black, the kills, with shade,
Moist with
shade, and the graveyard odors, the graveyard hush,
The hush of
weedy distracted flowers, grass flowers, bush flowers,
Flowers of savor,
and those of ill repute.
I love the way the syntax twists and turns, through musical repetitions and
variations and an odd, yet perfectly right, vocabulary. 'Garden of Flesh,
Garden of Stone', a long poem about a bird and a stone statue of a boy, had
me on the edge of my poetic seat, beginning:
The little
white throat has his head in the boy's ear.
maybe he has found some
seed in it. Or maybe
he is telling
the boy a secret, some sweet nothing.
Or maybe he has
mistaken the rimmed flesh,
taut and
sweet as the skin of a fig, for his bathing dish,
and is
about to dive through the pale sky
reflected in
it, lengths of blue, lengths of gray,
yards and
yards of quarried white. And the boy,
who is made of
stone, who has stood still for a long time,
pissing in
the stone basin, seems this morning
in the peculiar light top be leaning his large
head,
barely balanced on a narrow neck, toward the sparrow,
as if he
likes the soft sewing motion of the beak
within his ear, the delicate morse of the white throat...
As I'm typing this I realise there's only 3 full stops in there, and it could
just roll on forever with poise and ease - such a confident, deep and
pleasing form of lyric. As is the ending of 'Dead Doe':
And this is
the soul: like it or not. Yes: the soul comes down: yes:
comes into
the deer: yes: who dies: yes: and in her death twins herself
into swans:
fools us with mist and accident into believing her
newfound
finery
and we are not
afraid
though we
should be
and we are
not afraid as we watch her soul fly on; paired
as the soul
always is: with itself:
with others.
Two swans....
Child. We are
done for
in the most
remarkable ways.
Pegeen Kelly's subjects in Song
are rich and varied: the myriad forms of the natural world; statuary; birds;
myths and folklore; Jehova's Witnesses; wild turkeys; Botticelli's St.
Sebastian; a goat's head hanging by ropes in a tree and, amongst others, pipistrelle bats that:
Look like the
flung hands of deaf boys, restlessly
Signing the
dark. Deaf boys
Who all night and
into the half-lit hours
When the
trees step from their shadows
And the
shadows go to grass
Whistle those
high-pitched tunes that, though unheard, hurt
Our thoughts.
Pipistrelles, little pipes, little
Night pipes,
the peculiar
Lost fluting
of the outcast heart. Poor heart.
Poems like these I found constantly surprising, page after page, making Song an extraordinary debut collection. The
Orchard is no less remarkable a
follow-up: highly symbolic, mythic, dream-like poems - such as 'The Dragon',
about two swarms of bees carrying a snake through a garden - and some fine
prose poems, including the fabulous 'Windfall' that begins with a 'wretched
pond in the woods', wherein live some magical carp 'large as trumpets'. The
disquieting tone of the whole book is represented well by 'Blessed is the
Field':
A doorbell
ringing through an abandoned house
Makes the
falling rooms, papered with lilies and roses
And
two-headed goats seem larger and more ghostly.
The high
grasses spill their seed. It is hard to know
The right way
in or out. But here, you can have
Which
flower you like, though there are not many left,
Lady's thumb
in the gravel by the wood's fringe
And on the
shale spit beneath the walnut that houses
The crow, the
peculiar cat's-paw, sweet everlasting,
Unbearably
soft. Do not mind the crow's bark.
He is fierce
and solitary, but he will let us pass,
Patron of the
lost and broken-spirited
or the strange meeting of a madwoman on a bridge, at dusk, as she feeds corn
to fish that are not there. 'Pale Rider' is equally haunting, quite
literally; a long poem about a 'fallen doe', hacked to pieces by a hunter,
who revisits the narrator as they wander back to the grotto in the woods, at
night:
She shone
The doe, her
four heads, held high and perfectly still,
Facing in
four different directions. And then I saw
Something
else, darker, protruding from her breast.
It was a
fifth neck and head, hanging upside down
In front,
like the useless third leg of Siamese twins
Joined at the
torso that hangs out of the spine,
And is amputated at birth, or like the
water-darkened
Rudder of a
ship. I heard hot air sucking in and out
Of the doe's
many nostrils, in and out. the mist
grew darker,
and I felt afraid, for I knew even before
My eyes
confirmed it, that the fifth head was not
The doe's
head at all, as I had thought, but the head
Of a grown
child that the doe was trying to deliver
From her
breast, and I knew that the child would never
Be born, but
must ride always with her, his body
Embedded in
hers, his head up to the sky.
This is a very remarkable, different kind of poetry full of mystery and
surprises; celebratory and unafraid of the dark; marvellously assured in its
use of language and about the wonders and horrors of creation. This book
really should be on your reading list.
© Andy Brown 2008
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