From Booklist
Kirby has always been funny, but whereas his earlier poems (see
I Think I Am Going to Call My Wife Paraguay, 2004) are in short, punchy lines appropriate to their wit, the later ones consist of relatively long-lined paragraphs. Kirby has made the latter distinctively his form by mastering the run-on sentence more completely than any other American poet. Sure, Beats such as Ginsberg and Snyder run on like crazy, but the principle of their verse is projection; the poet propels consciousness to ever further levels or degrees of reality, taking readers on a spiritual trip, and syntactic sense be damned. Kirby runs on considerably less cosmicly, like a good raconteur (which he is), one whom you can't not listen to; his peers are prose writers--Mark Twain, James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, and Stephen King. Kirby's voice and matter (teaching, literature, traveling, rock 'n' roll, everyday bozohood) are utterly personal and, despite all the laughter, ultimately moving.
Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Product Description
Long-lined and often laugh-aloud funny, Kirby's poems are ample steamer trunks into which the poet seems to be able to put just about anything-the heated restlessness of youth, the mixed blessings of self-imposed exile, the settled pleasures of home. As the poet Philip Levine says, "the world that Kirby takes into his imagination and the one that arises from it merge to become a creation like no other, something like the world we inhabit but funnier and more full of wonder and terror. He has evolved a poetic vision that seems able to include anything, and when he lets it sweep him across the face of Europe and America, the results are astonishing." The poems in The House on Boulevard St. were written within earshot of David Kirby's Old World masters, Shakespeare and Dante. From the former, Kirby takes the compositional method of organizing not only the whole book but also each separate section as a dream; from the latter, a three-part scheme that gives the book rough symmetry.
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