Customer Reviews

The Orchard (American Poets Continuum)

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A few decades back, when Jon Anderson wrote that "the secret of poetry is cruelty," he must have had something like Brigit Kelly's poems in mind. Kelly's third book, The Orchard, continues her fascination with the suffering and cruelty that lies somewhere between the animal and the human, obsessing over pain directly linked with physical beauty.

It's important to note that the speaker in Kelly's poem is a witness to suffering rather than an instigator. She seeks to comfort and justify those in pain, the human and animal, the living and the dead, to name them with poetical power, as she does a diseased dog in "The Wolf," linking that dog to wolf and then wolf to myth, making "of her something / Better than she could make of herself". This poem is one of the finest in a collection full of fine poems.

And Kelly likes her descriptions steeped in beauty and terror. In the last line of "Elegy" she writes, "Brighter than a bed of lilies struck by snow." That violent "struck" means everything to Kelly's poetics. It's subtle, hidden between the blinding purity of the lilies and the snow.

Reading The Orchard by Brigit Pegeen Kelly is an indescribable experience, like listening to Rachmaninoff's Third Symphony or a Bach fugue. Stunned by hypnotic images, the reader is grabbed by the throat and ripped into a labyrinth of numinous voices, quickening classical statues, dripping mist, rotting fruit, flapping wings and a pulsing sense of the presence of music and danger. Kelly's poetry is breathtaking in its language and force. Reading one poem creates an insatiable thirst to read everything this remarkable poet has written.

I just love the place she has created on earth where her poems can happen.

Brigit Pegeen Kelly, The Orchard (BOA Editions, 2004)

The Orchard is the kind of book one doesn't see too often these days; it's poetry that's "academic" in the trust sense of the word, thick almost to the point of unreadability with diction that's just this side of archaic, layer upon layer of symbolism, and all that sort of thing that makes high school and college English professors foam at the mouth. There is little doubt in my mind, having read this book, that Kelly is on the fast track to canonization; this is substantiated by The Orchard having been nominated for a National Book Critics' Circle Award this year. Because of all this, there's the temptation to compare her to poets already in the canon (there's certainly a good argument to be made for comparing her style and diction, and probably substance, to that of, say, Pound, or to a lesser extent Eliot). I'll try to avoid it, given the length limits I'm stuck with, but those with more room than I have might want to take a crack at it.

The basic problem with the canon is that, while it's often beautiful work (as is the case here), it sometimes lets the simple factors of readability and accessibility fall by the wayside in order to be deep. The best poets who flirt with canonization-- Li-Young Lee is the one who springs immediately to mind-- have the depth and flavor, but also have that surface layer that says "here's a poem; if all you get out of it is what you see on the surface, that's okay." Kelly's work has a marked absence of this trait; the language itself almost seems to be pointing the reader toward the depths, saying "in order to get anything out of this poem, you'd best come armed with a knowledge of mythology, and an OED would probably help as well." Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but it's likely to turn away those not yet familiar with poetry these days; as we all know, at the turn of the twenty-first century, "those not yet familiar with poetry" is, well, almost everyone.

Recommended for advanced readers. Newcomers to the scene might want to go with a little lighter reading.