Customer Reviews

Dwelling Song (The Contemporary Poetry Series)

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I came to Dwelling Song expecting the poems I had seen in Keith's first book, Design. Or at least that part of those poems I could most keenly remember. Keith has a way of working with detail, of sharpening an image until it occupies a time, space, and potential outside of reality, and yet reflective of reality. That may sound too circular. I guess what I'm trying to say is that Keith has a capacity to simultaneously see and feel an image within the space of her poem, opening the reader to the possibility of its intellectual and emotional significance. This is what I brought to Dwelling Song from Design.

And that precise descriptive power is in this second book, though it takes different shapes. Certain deeply voiced poems, like "The Gallery" or "Song for the Rain", describe the sharpness the world assumes when loss becomes the only lens for viewing the world, when it might seem better for the speaker to hold herself away from this world, because it offers only an intent encroachment upon her peace. These poems are ruddy and inspiring. When I finish one, it makes me want another as potent & emotionally dense. And so when Keith offers only six or seven I react by first wondering if this move away from the deep voice is a flaw.

And it may be. However, the intelligence in this book, and in Design, makes me trust this poet. I am willing to look and allow Keith to teach me how I should read her book. These poems outside the deep voice are still dealing with the book's premise in an equally sincere way. It's just that their method of shifting from one image to the next bring their emotional affect too close to the reader's face. And I guess what I start to see is a flattening of that precision Keith offers throughout the book. For example, in the book's center poem, "Rooms Where We Are", Keith uses a clipped fragment to torque her syntax, and because most of these fragments refer back to images she's described in the previous section of the book, the reader, hopefully, experiences through language the sadness and waywardness that can safely be called a theme throughout the book. Unfortunately, my personal experience reading these poems is a hollowness. The repeated images are too heavy with agenda, and too typically gesturing back. There is little subtlety and too much strategy displayed in these poems, and so I find it difficult to let them sink deeper.

Even with this criticism, I recommend Dwelling Song. Partly because of the real talent I see in this second book of poems, and the ambition. I feel that Keith's modulation of voice (the third full section seems to combine the deep voice, and the language voice) gives me more to think about, and though some of these poems may not involve me emotionally, they all interest me intellectually. What I see is a poet who won't settle for the safe, Keith poem, but one who will continually redefine what a Keith poem might be for today.