Sonic delights

Language poets play with sounds. At their best, it’s as if the music of a batch of well-chosen words so perfectly echoes their meaning, it makes you suspect there’s sense to the universe. At their worst, language poets chortle gibberish.

Richard Kenney makes language sing without humming idle tunes. He’s deeply influenced by W.H. Auden, and, strangely, he’s dead set on playing with the ballad.

The what? The ballad. The form used in the folk song “Barb’ry Ellen.” Auden occasionally flirted with things resembling ballads, such as in the untitled poem with the famous lines, “You shall love your crooked neighbor / With your crooked heart.” Such poems are often chanty, like sugary childhood songs. But when Kenney riffs on them, it’s lovely, as in the title poem:

Rain, rain, rain

Scattering down the sky

Where the heart’s an armillary sphere

Of rainbows in the eye.

Now the water clock

A trickle under rime,

And oh I fear for the good king’s daughter

Crossing over time.

Kenney doesn’t chortle, and he writes in form with such skill, you don’t notice it: “ . . . What’s / A never-was-nor-ever-could-be? -- Quetzalcoatl; / Phoenix. What’s was-but-gone-nor-evermore? -- those quadroons / Of pterosaurs.” The off-rhymes are beautiful, but they barely register. They’re a lovely descant providing landscape for the melody. John Donne’s “Go and Catch a Falling Star” haunts this book like a blessed ghost.

Surprisingly, Kenney is also a political poet. “ . . . [O]ccasional dizzying / Grief of another kid dead for why again? . . . That exhausting hero-machine . . . who shall / Hold that archaic smile when Iraq shatters / Like a pinata full of bees.” He doesn’t sound pious, which is more to be admired, and he’s good with that moment when the poet turns to the audience: “war falls / To you.”

A teacher of mine once said great poetry often deals with light. There’s great poetry here, and it deals a lot with light. There’s also love and lots of licking. “ . . . the ancient volcano, big as the mother / Of all mother ships, shows its alien / Glacier to the moon. It looks close enough to lick.” It’s as if Kenney thinks the universe is yummy and must drag his tongue over it. The most touching poems concern his daughter. Just a verse here and there, but it’s like watching galaxies open.

I have a tiny gripe: One reason Auden is so great was that he saw beauty, yet drew lines linking small unkindnesses to the big global ones. Kenney either can’t or doesn’t do this. He should.