Review
Addressing the spiritual void of a Godless society, these deliberately elliptical poems probe daunting ontological mysteries. Keelan imagines a deity who is "howling and dirty from the listening," one who is paralyzed, polluted and disseminated throughout the secular world, where only "machinery transcribes deceit." The dominant question soon becomes "Does the God we believe in want us?" Alternately defiant and plangent, these poems refuse to "take [their] place beside" the fixed, indifferent icon glimpsed in such unlikely forms as a scarecrow and a Civil War photograph. The book is framed by twotitle poems, both of which explore the secularist's reluctance to find the answers to her questions. As "the spirit of matter" moves across the human terrain, it conceals as it consoles; "coal muffles the birth-cry" of a mother about to kill her newborn child. It is to Keelan's credit that she can illuminate an entire series of such meditations without resorting to sentiment or facile resolution.
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. -- From The Boston Review
An American Primitivist Inside Her Painting
And Its Discontents
Armistice
Ave Verum Corpus
Beloved
The Body You Love May Be Your Own
Bratok Window
The Camera's Eye Turned To You...
Chaff
Chalktrace
Covenant
Demography
Elegy For Anna Karenina
The End Is An Animal
Fallout
Free Verse
Harvest
In Debt
Injury
The Modern Life Of The Soul
The Necessary Angel
One Parable
Parable 2
Parable 4
Parable 4b (against The Objective Correlative)
Parable 5
Parable 6
Past Crossing
Past Travel
Patron
Richter
Rushing The Gates Of Empirical Gardens
Same Question
The Secularist
The Secularist: 1. Grammar Of Assent
The Secularist: 2. Apology
Something To Keep
Spring
To Sleep
Tractatus Francaise
While The Wind Speaks
White
Who Will Not Join Together
The World As Mediation
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. -- From The Boston Review
An American Primitivist Inside Her Painting
And Its Discontents
Armistice
Ave Verum Corpus
Beloved
The Body You Love May Be Your Own
Bratok Window
The Camera's Eye Turned To You...
Chaff
Chalktrace
Covenant
Demography
Elegy For Anna Karenina
The End Is An Animal
Fallout
Free Verse
Harvest
In Debt
Injury
The Modern Life Of The Soul
The Necessary Angel
One Parable
Parable 2
Parable 4
Parable 4b (against The Objective Correlative)
Parable 5
Parable 6
Past Crossing
Past Travel
Patron
Richter
Rushing The Gates Of Empirical Gardens
Same Question
The Secularist
The Secularist: 1. Grammar Of Assent
The Secularist: 2. Apology
Something To Keep
Spring
To Sleep
Tractatus Francaise
While The Wind Speaks
White
Who Will Not Join Together
The World As Mediation
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
