Kerry Shawn Keys. Night Flight.
Rockford, Michigan. Presa. 2012.
isbn 9780983125136
A good many of Kerry Shawn Keys’s
poems can be characterized, if not
explained, by the lines “Everything’s
open to derangement” and “There
aren’t any rules for the subjects in
this medium.” One of the simplest
examples is “The dogwood at the
edge / of the park is barking out
flowers,” but other poems, like “The
Ache,” which opens Night Flight, have
more consistently startling imagery.
Many of the other poems celebrate,
sometimes with considerable
reservations, the power of the female
principle and, especially in the first
of the book’s two parts, the natural
world, rural but hardly pastoral and
sometimes sounding like that of Robert
Frost—the American woodlands,
in particular the birds who inhabit
it. In the second half, the world is
predominantly urban Vilnius, Lithuania,
where Keys has lived for some
years. These poems tend to have
less wrenched or striking imagery,
but they are at least as somber or
guarded in their celebration.
Readers who take comfort in
paraphrasable sense may prefer part
2, but those more drawn to experiment
will find the daring, imaginative
flights more appealing. Read
word by word, these can seem confusing,
but they create an emotional
undertone that uses a different kind
of syntax. Throughout the volume,
poems create a world both entrancing
and confusing and reject the lures
of pantheism or indeed any kind
of theism. Near the end of “The
Ache” Keys writes, “at last you understand
the majestic indifference of
the Promised Land,” though the last
line offers “the rising sun.” To put it
another way, throughout the collection,
biblical and other religious texts
offer frameworks for imagery but
no solutions, but the end is not illumination
but nothingness, for “this
dream / of life is a little whiff of the
opium / of death opening its womb.”
Yet the overall effect of the book
conveys the speaker’s joy in observing
and recording. The poem just
quoted ends with the central image
of the octopus, which cradles and
seems to sustain humanity, rocking
“in a swish and suspense / Of children
about to commence / a journey
together into another space, / a spinning,
a suction, a balance of grace.”
Robert Murray Davis
University of Oklahoma