Purchase
Poems, 1994-2007
5 Spot
February 2008
On Sale: April 29, 2008
192 pages
ISBN: 0307267636
EAN: 9780307267634
Hardcover
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Fiction Poetry
Fourteen years after his last book of poems, we have a
glorious new volume from Richard Kenney, who has been
hailed by The New York Review of Books as “one of the most
gifted and multifaceted and original of American poets.” In The One-Strand River, Kenney has tales to tell—of loves,
births, and confounding politics—in lively, quicksilver
language that surprises at every turn. We meet the poet as
a middle-aged husband walking the dog,
confiding, “Churlish / thoughts bedevil me, often.
Sunshine; girls / half my age; the future; unseen
perishing / armies.” He swings between surreal dawn vistas
and the unsettling sight of seventh-grade girls circling
his teenage son; between the pleasure of a New Year’s
celebration “with Nipperkin” and—striking a note that is
rare in contemporary poetry—satirical attack, with an eye
on the news of the day. A master of many tones, Kenney
recalls a nursery rhyme in the title poem—“Gray goose and
gander/ How long have we together?”—and ponders the “one-
strand river” that is the sea, with its one encircling
shore and its tidal pull on both the landscape and the
human heart. Kenney is never a confessional poet, yet we meet a powerful
mind here—that of a man who is always responding to
provocations seen and unseen, taking pleasure in the
possibilities of words themselves, tossing them up into the
daily storm of our vexations and our perilous happiness.
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