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Works by Karl Kirchwey
(Writer)
kkirchwe@brynmawr.edu
Website: ???
Profile created
March 22, 2005
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A Wandering Island (1990)
A survivor of the Roman sack of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., an old man in his
garden in upstate New York, a fourteenth-century Picard glazier, a
modern city-dweller repainting his front hall--the speakers in these
richly textured poems reflect on the culture of their own time and
contemplate the enigma of home. Here Karl Kirchwey provides the reader
with a synchronous vision of the ancient and the contemporary while
illustrating the paradox of geographical fixity in a world of change.
The poems use the formal resources of the modern syllabic and the
classic hexameter, of free verse as well as the stanza forms of Herbert
and Wordsworth. Their settings encompass French and Italian Switzerland,
Sicily, Greece, rural New England, Manhattan, and London. Together the
poems form an atlas of significant emotional range and terrestrial
color. For Allo (Sculpture from the Harpy Tomb at Xanthos, now in the
British Museum) It is as if the wind had flayed her woolen chiton from
her, yet somehow she is clothed: neither in flesh nor stone. Has she
been stripped by time, then, or the fury of her own movement? It starts
up by her throat: a Y of sinuous folds descends between her breasts;
then, magnified as roses are in fabric in a light summer dress, so that
the lower blossoms are actually larger than those above, or as waves
find their murderous amplitude through long movement at sea alone, or
thought does, these too counter their direction, involving the whole
body in their torque of contrary motion, so that the hem tosses in
restless troughs, a single flange of vengeance floating in the way the
mind does, and condemns itself in solitude.
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Those I Guard (1993)
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The Engrafted Word (1998)
The graftings of flesh upon flesh, of history upon time and memory, of
the New World on the Old, of language upon silence, of faith upon doubt:
These are the graftings that form this third book of poems by Guggenheim
Fellow and Rome Prize winner Karl Kirchwey. Whether he is writing of the
intimate moment, as in "Sonogram" (in which the poet first sees his
son-to-be), or the painfully personal, as in "Barium" (in which he
recounts a brush with mortality), Kirchwey reaches effortlessly across
time to link us to our past, to the larger universe of humankind. From
the deep sensuousness of "Amalfi" to the gently mocking "Syracuse," from
the haunting echoes of the past in "Two Landscapes in Numidia" to the
almost blasphemous bitter edge of "Twelve Epigrams for Passion Week,
Ischia," he graces us with poetics of a high order even while weaving
the threads that tie this collection into a stunningly integrated whole.
These are indeed poems that reward rereading.
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At the Palace of Jove (2002)
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