In elegantly contemplative poems, Kenny Fries explores the natural world of the desert, carrying us on a journey that is both an esthetic and spiritual quest. "From Exodus to Eliot's The Waste Land the desert has been the site for spiritual quests that balance a deep mourning for the human condition against a longing for joy and transcendence," says Alfred Corn. "These spare, precise poems chart the complexities of human intimacy with both delicacy and brashness. Their mix of candor and tenderness is memorable and moving," says Chase Twichell, author of The Snow Watcher.
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About the Author
Kenny Fries is the author of The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory, which received the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights, and Body, Remember: A Memoir. He is the editor of Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out. His books of poems include Anesthesia and Desert Walking.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Negotiating Solitude,
This review is from: Desert Walking: Poems (Paperback)
As the title of Kenny Fries's new book, "Desert Walking", might lead us to suspect, a peculiar emptiness surrounds the speaker of these poems who much like a mime circumscribes the confines of this space searching not so much for a way out as for a resolution of his solitude. The three sections of the book describe different phases of this search. In the first the speaker longs to bring his beloved closer but paradoxically nature fills the emptiness in his stead. In the second the speaker observes other artists and their negotiations of the space between self and other, especially lover. Finally the speaker turns again to nature, but like a mime who has stepped out of his box into the crowd, he accepts the distance between himself and his lover near the end of their relationship. Nature here not only surrounds the characters with the sort of Olympian presence of the first section but is also marked, a record of human history. It is as if poet and speaker stepped back to gain a wider perspective that allows his subjects to expand without distancing the reader. The poems in this collection are cleanly made whether formal or not. The combination of diligent use of tradition and the deflection from it lend weight to the feel of a search. In fact the arc of this search of self for other through the bold landscapes of this book is a welcome relief from the unrelenting narcissism of the bulk of poems published in literary magazines recently. Lisa Grigg
5.0 out of 5 stars
poems of luminous moments and landscapes,
By
This review is from: Desert Walking: Poems (Paperback)
Kenny Fries is a poet of the luminous moment and the luminous landscape. His poems, even when melancholy or wistful, celebrate the world illuminated by love: the love of two men for each other, the love of a man for the natural world (especially the stark beauty of the deserts of the American West), and the love of the artist for color, shape, and form, for drawing order out of matter. The pure lyricism of these poems is piercing, the intensity of focus is unwavering.
Desert Walking could as aptly have been entitled Art and Love, for it's largely devoted to (and an example of) these two modes of attention, two ways of seeing the world anew. Many of the poems are about painters and paintings, celebrating and exploring the artist's construction of the world. One of its centerpieces is about and incorporates the work and voice of Georgia O'Keeffe, for example, and there is also an extended homage to Hart Crane which is both lament and celebration. As Fries writes in "Toward an Abstract Art," a poem which explores a verbal analogue to Ellsworth Kelly's painterly process, "it matters/what we make/from what we find." In the same poem, Fries urges us to "Open your work to the shapes of the world./But take only what is necessary." Fries sees the traces of the past in the landscapes he moves through, just as he sees the presence of the past in the current moment: "the earth's history/is displayed in shape and color." The poems bring together the shapes the observing eye draws out of the natural world and the shapes the artist's eye produces, just as they link words, the poet's raw material, with colors and shapes, the painter's raw material: "colors/become the words of a language//without syntax, and finally/...the form becomes the word." Such an incarnation of form in language is one of this book's most compelling accomplishments.
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