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Works by Karl Kirchwey |
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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. -
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. -
At the Palace of Jove (2002)
See also:
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After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (1995) by James Lasdun and Michael Hofmann, ed.
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Twentieth Century Poems on the Gospels: an Anthology (1996)
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Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (The Texas Pan American Series) (1996) by Stephen Tapscott
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The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1987-1998 (1998)
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The KGB Bar Book of Poems (2000) by David Lehman