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 βone of the most gifted and multifaceted and original of American poets.β
In The One-Strand River, Kenney has tales to tellβof loves, births, and confounding politicsβin lively, quicksilver language that surprises at every turn. We meet the poet as a middle-aged husband walking the dog, confiding, βChurlish / thoughts bedevil me, often. Sunshine; girls / half my age; the future; unseen perishing / armies.β He swings between surreal dawn vistas and the unsettling sight of seventh-grade girls circling his teenage son; between the pleasure of a New Yearβs celebration βwith Nipperkinβ andβstriking a note that is rare in contemporary poetryβsatirical attack, with an eye on the news of the day. A master of many tones, Kenney recalls a nursery rhyme in the title poemββGray goose and gander/ How long have we together?ββand ponders the βone- strand riverβ 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 hereβthat 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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