Open Books: Events
October 22, 2009 07:30 PM
KEVIN GOODAN
A walking meditation over a working farm, Kevin Goodan's second collection, Winter Tenor ($15.95 Alice James), is a series of darkly resonant, untitled poems that conjure field, pasture, ditch, animals wild and kept, and the keeper who sees, touches, questions. Its tone is somber, reverent; its language rich; its imagery sometimes chilling, sometimes searing. Birth and death receive equal measure here, as do bud-break and fire. Any narrative seems at once centuries-large and lightning brief --
"[B]urgeoning sentences / Of the fields, poplar that are verbs / For wind, a comma sizzling on bright tin / That is the body of a nestling dropped by a hawk -- / The tolerances between which we almost prevail, / How any goat announces the arrival of something unseen."
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