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Open Books: Event Archive
February 25, 2008 07:00 PM
RICHARD KENNEY
PLEASE NOTE! This reading will be held at the Seattle Public Library,
1000 4th Ave.; parking available in garage.
We're delighted to join with the Seattle Public Library to present this
reading by MacArthur Fellow and University of Washington professor Richard
Kenney from The One-Strand River ($26.95 Knopf), his fourth book. It has been fourteen years since we've had a new volume from Mr. Kenney, and we can assure you that the wait was worthwhile. In the endnotes, he describes this collection as a chimera, "a discontinuous mixture, woolly here, scaly
there." It is indeed a gathering of lyric poems that stretches across
topic, from the personal to the global. Yet that discontinuous gathering is
made vibrantly, energetically whole by Mr. Kenney -- his is a unique melding
of music and mind. Fatherhood, aging, the Iraq war, poetry, science,
mythology, these draw his keen attention, but such a list does not convey
the complexity of thinking and intricacy of language exhibited in his
poetry. He is a gifted singer and astute social critic, his work ranging
from the biting -- "Denial / Is us. We cringe in lemonade. We horrible gaily
smile," -- to the gently intimate -- "Once // I tried to write invisibly, /
but all lifetime is a candle."
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