This week, in lieu of the random observations, grandiose commentary, and generally over-blown marginalia the Museum usually foists on unsuspecting readers, I'm instead offering a book recommendation and review.The book in question is a book of poetry, and the author is American poet, David Kirby, whose previous books include Big-Leg Music, My Twentieth Century, The House of Blue Light, and many others.
As recently as 2006 Kirby’s work was again honored with the closest approximation the world of contemporary poetry offers to an official stamp of approval: His poem, “Seventeen Ways From Tuesday,” was selected for the 2006 volume of the Best American Poetry series. This excellent poem and many others equally deserving of acclaim can be found in The House on Boulevard Street: New and Selected Poems, a recently released round-up of new and previously published poems by David Kirby, offered through Louisiana State University Press’s excellent “Southern Messenger Poets” series, edited by David Smith.
The House on Boulevard Street: New and Selected Poems offers a generous sampling of everything that Kirby does best as a poet. An acknowledged master of the long narrative poem, Kirby’s engaging, witty, and highly-literate narrative voice has the power to elevate the anecdotal to the universal, using the first-person perspective to transcend what I think T.S. Eliot once called the “merely personal” as he drags his readers breathlessly along on fugue-like reveries through personal imaginative landscapes that blur the geographic boundaries between memory and metaphor, fact and confabulation, the sublime and the mundane.
All of which is just a fancy way of saying Kirby’s poems go beyond the entertaining and often amusing stories they tell to touch on fundamentally universal human themes—like a modern-day Mark Twain, Kirby spins yarns that have the enduring quality of modern fables.
Over the years, Kirby has perfected the art of rambling coherently—of stepping out of the way of his own voice, so to speak, and letting each successive line of verse flow into the next so freely and naturally you can’t help but be swept along. And this subtle skill is on full display in The House on Boulevard Street.
Also on display is Kirby’s characteristic knack for setting up a big tent, and drawing everyone inside: Kirby’s poems are moral without being moralistic, absurd without being absurdist, culturally-literate but not elitist. And what makes such seemingly impossible feats of literary acrobatics possible is the richness of Kirby’s own voice, which by turns is witty, urbane, philosophical, and nostalgic. Each poem makes you feel as if you’re sitting down having a one-on-one conversation with the man himself.
If you were once an avid poetry reader, but lost the habit, or if you generally find poetry too dry or obscure to enjoy, but love a good entertaining read, give The House on Boulevard Street a try. After reading a few of Kirby’s poems, you’re sure to find something that makes you hungry for a few more. Then before long you just might find yourself with a healthy new habit. Vitamin P: It does the heart good.
