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4.5
In "A Home for Wayward Girls" (New Issues $14.00), the poet Kevin Boyle takes us on a journey that is as well planned and arranged as an exhibit at the city art museum of Boyle's beloved Philadelphia. The book begins with poems like "Predilection", a work which teaches the reader to look covertly with overt eyes on the simple other end of simple actions and events. It ceases immediately the idea that a poetry collection should meditate on a theme, and rather throws the whole show in reverse and begs the question of "what would happen if we drove backwards through history? Was it really all about sex and God?" At the heart of the first poems is a love for the dark beast of sex and how we drape and worship it in flowing robes and then try to undress it with our eyes. Boyle's Catholicism is not left out in the meditation, and these poems question again and again the divinity we find in life's joinings, whether they be physical or spiritual, and whether their deathlessness has really been infused by us. The collection continues with ideas on the man's role in childbirth and the fact that a man is involved through history and worry, without really being a party to a child's bloody and scientific debut. At the same time, he is unafraid to turn sentimental when writing about the adoption of his daughter, Marina, from the countryside of Russia in the poem, "Russian Child, Nesting Doll." This collection is the product of someone walking, as closely as possible, the line between the introspective life and the life lived openly, with all of the body ready to be touched with heat or cold. It reels between the ephemeral this will only happen once feeling of a daughter left for the first time for school so that the parents can have sex, and the seemingly endless years in which our parents and then ourselves get old and die. Humor is embraced with "The Death of the Drama Poem", where Boyle does not make the mistake of writing humor poetry, but rather writes poetic humor about how words and images can be intertwined and how it does not take a bard to say what a bard should say. The fourth and final section is a full-circle idea, where you remember the beginning poem "The Lullaby of History" on page one of the book while you read about a man's own history. This final section talks about the heavy death of parents and the feather light life of children, and so talks about losing an entire history of Ireland in one's past and yet making a future in our children with all that we've gladly done for them. It doesn't relate the sadness of the slow breaking down of the body as it simply shows it, with bedsores and taking mother to the bathroom. Just when you have learned again to love your parents you find yourself on Noah's Arch, over hearing, along with all the animals of creation, Noah and his wife screwing away the virtual loss of humanity. In this collection women wear silk kimonos and teenagers slow dance. The German language begins to explain some things. You are an American looking at the once troubled and now quiet countryside of Ireland and then reclined on a sofa with your wife wondering about Cezanne's model paper flowers. The book is a story of stories, a liturgy of sorts where the final feeling one gets is that feeling of having studied, in amazing detail over years, the idea of who we are and how we've come here, and where, now, we will take these ragged bodies, these seasoned hearts of ours?
