Customer Reviews

The Temple Gate Called Beautiful

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David Kirby's poems are marked by a unique expansiveness: within their sprawling lines, they bring together disparate facts, personalities, movies, literature, and more, and somehow show that not only are all these things connected, but they reveal something deeply personal about us, too. In his offhand alchemy, Kirby seems to seek nothing and find everything, and even get some laughs while he's at it.

His new collection, "The Temple Gate Called Beautiful," has moments like this. But--perhaps because his influences here include Dante and Virgil, among others--there are many poems in which he confronts questions of the spiritual much more baldly than usual, in the process revealing his own religious judgments in a way that will not be attractive to all readers.

Case in point: in the first stanza of the poem "Hello, I Must Be Going" (pages 40-46), Kirby insists that "this will not...be one more crappy poem about a dying mother!" But that is, in fact, his main theme, and he handles it bluntly, without the subtlety of his earlier poem "On My Mother's Blindness" (from The Ha-Ha). In addition, the poem is built on Kirby's own assumptions about the afterlife and the nature of death. This is not in itself bad, but the extent to which these assumptions suffuse the poem's six rambling pages may alienate readers who do not share Kirby's views--and this lack of universality causes this poem (and others in this book) to lack some poignancy; to feel, sometimes, almost polemical.

I am by no means condemning Mr. Kirby for having his own spiritual views, nor for letting them inform his poems. But I do feel that this choice on his part makes this volume of poems less accessible than previous collections. I can't shake the sense that he was aiming for something more like Czselaw Milosz's "Encounter," reprinted in full on a page of this book: communicating the awe and mystery of our lives in the most delicate way.

At the same time, though, perhaps this book represents a transition. Though the poems are often bogged down by Kirby's self-consciously weighty contemplations, they still have much of the daily-ness and mordant humor that characterize his best work. If, in his next collection, say, he successfully melds his trademark casual tone with the profundity he reaches for here, he may achieve a new poetry for himself. And that would be a boon to his readers.

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Not just prose chopped into lines, but funny too. Kirby's mind ranges from connection to connection to shape incidents into funny stories. Helps if you know most of the same cultural references he does, but that's true of the Young Turks too.

Kirby is always good company, and this book is a bit deeper than some of his first.