Customer Reviews

For the Kingdom (American Poets Continuum)

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At the first glance, his poems are simple. However, there is a great deal of work that lies behind this seeming simplicity. He is able to find the most essential material in our speech and uses it to achieve the clarity of vision that is almost classical. How? Why? Perhaps because he is asking us the most essential question: "What does it mean to be human?" And, he is able to find the language simple enough to deliver our answers.

I would like to share some of lines of his that I find myself remembering when in need:

"Something unnamed, grief-sweetened keeps calling us out."

"Take me, you want to say even as you are taken."

"See these hands. We raised them to touch and pray."

"I have read all night at the kitchen table. Whenever I look up, people are dying and being born all over the earth."

"We are here / to weep, to touch the living shore, to leave our bones."

"Look. Because I love you fifty miles to the north, I can lie down in still darkness and disappear, with my eyes open."

"Together now in simple nearness, we study each other. There is French wine. Her face burns. We know this place. We do not touch and do not touch."

Piccione's poems are spare and careful, wonderfully devoid of artifice and intellectualism, grounded in the world. His voice is large and generous, extraordinarily kind to the smallest moments and emotions and beings in the world. He asks big questions and provides comfort here on the edge of the dark in language that won't let us dismiss him.