from Mare Nostrum, Volume V & VI (2008)
Review of Richard Kenney’s The One-Strand River (Knopf, $26.95)
by Cody Walker
The One-Strand River, Richard Kenney’s fourth collection of poetry, both recognizes and argues against “the natural darkening of the world.” In pages that are alternately meditative, funny, harrowing, and bright (and sometimes all of these at once), the poems burrow into deep psychic recesses (“Now the dense / dwarf poem scythes forth, / shears time at the hilt, / fends fire, folds / us in its fool / moon-suit embrace / and drops the smoky mica visor clang”) only to reveal (or better, realize) that “all lifetime is a candle.” The book makes room for the clang-bang of “the Pig God Phug” and the stark beauty of “September”: “All that gone up blood / somewhere in a white cloud bank / seeding next year’s rain.” Who else today writes so well, and so variously?
As Kenney mentions in a note, his book is a chimera: “wooly here, scaly there.” Academic satires share space with love poems; political addresses give way to elegies. Exuberant cries abound, as do sly asides. (Compare “O hell of the too too long soon simoom sin mind!” with “Unutterable / Doesn’t cut it anymore, if you know what I’m saying.”) Kenney can be haiku-quick (here’s “The Judeo-Christian Tradition,” in full: “Of course they’d need an / Omnipotent god. Look whom / He’d have to pardon”), and he can be hilariously digressive (note the parenthetical takedown in “Lives of the Romantics”: “All these things actually / Happened. Have you ever clawed a vessel off a lee shore? / No? Then shut up about Shelley”). He’s tender when writing about his family (“Beside me here, my children / mutter in Sumerian / something charming, some- / thing about the beginning / of things”) and fierce when writing about the architects of the Iraq War (“Former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, / Dressed casually in alligator clips and a hood, / Took questions again today from the Senate Subcommittee / For the Belated Investigation of What’s / Going On”). The poems operate on wildly different tonal levels, much like our lives do. As “More Charles and an Old Story” suggests, we ourselves are chimerical: a patchwork of traits and instincts, metonyms and memories.
The book, ideally, should be read out loud: to better appreciate its tonal range, and to revel in its rhymes. Kenney’s “fishes” are “uffish”; his “Seder, ah” leads to “etc.” Other rhymes are reversed: “Boxster” and “Starbucks,” “backwards” and “words back.” One rhyme is completed in Pig Latin, another in an asterisked footnote. Latin of the non-porcine type also chimes in: “Quinoa” gives us “sine qua non”; “ungoosed” finds its echo in the first part of “de gustibus / Non disputandum.” Citing lines that are pleasures to feel knocking about in one’s mouth will eventually tax the page limits (and perhaps binding) of this journal, but here are two more: in “2 A.M.,” a new child is an “outspraddled eagle / of the startle”; and, in “Challenges & Opportunities,” a “sub-dean begins to gibber like the Sibyl.”
Like many of our best works of art, The One-Strand River is both tonally and thematically in conversation with itself. The “black ice-like sundering” of an opening poem is answered, perhaps, pages later by the “roar of the sun in a slipped sleeve.” In the remarkable series of set pieces called “Scenes,” a woman sees an older man stumble. “Old fellow, she burned to say, it’s no shame / to be an old fellow! But then she saw in his impassive / face that he wished to eat her heart.” In the “Rings” cycle that follows, the violence escalates and is made personal: “Stick a screwdriver into my face twice. / Those are my eyes.” The apocalyptic prescience of “Open Letter” (printed in the Seattle Times in October of 2002, and envisioning Iraq shattering like “a piñata full of bees” while the “world howls murder”) is made bearable by the birth of the poet’s daughter in the book’s penultimate poem, “Late Child”: “Lost art: / hope’s hoops / recoopering / those gone days’ / stove staves, / O / again / oaken as / an acorn / heart!” Again and again, the book asks large questions: Who are we? Where are we going? Why do we do what we do? As Yeats wrote, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” As Kenney’s poem “New” concludes, “I’m asking me, I’m not asking you.”
For an example of a single poem in conversation with itself, we can turn to “Alaric Intelligence Memo #36.” For six stanzas, the poem succeeds as a satire of US late-empire malaise, ending with a terrorist-spy’s report home: “Their poetry barks. Their faith, a ruins, / Ghost-infested, affords no womb / Of future. In sum: however skilled, / They are overripe. My Lord, strike soon.” But turn the page: something amazing happens. The poem continues for two more stanzas, as the intelligence officer confesses, “I have lived too long among them. I am ill. / I am infected with dreams. At the first moon / Of conquest, I respectfully request to be killed.” The poem is suddenly fit for neither Fox News nor Al Jazeera. It’s news that stays news.
A final word about the book’s structure. The One-Strand River comprises eleven sections of eleven poems each; it has the mathematical precision of a snowflake. But a snowflake isn’t the right image: the book is too muscular, too sinuous, too sharp. It contains the “tragical mirth” that Shakespeare’s mechanicals propose in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (As Theseus observes, “That is hot ice and wondrous strange [black] snow.”) Full of hazard and brio, of “Larkinsense and myrrh,” the collection attends, with Janus-faced rigor, to the essential matters that make us human. It takes in the “big world’s lion yawn.” It imagines “the whole cold hologhast / Gone to quietude, though not yet, luckily, luckily.”