Kathleen
Driskell’s Next Door To The Dead
(University Press of Kentucky)
Driskell’s poetry in this volume is not
limited to the grave yard next door to her home in a converted country church
just outside Louisville. And sometimes it’s downright light-hearted.
“Love Poetry,” for instance, tells the
story of Dante Gabriel Rossetti burying some of his best love poems along with
the body of his adored young wife. Years later, having not made copies, the
poet hires “two scruff-bearded men with shovels” to dig the poems back up.
While digging, the men surprise themselves with thoughts of their own loves.
One hums a hymn while the other barks at the sky. The poem concludes: “While
all must know the lesson / that life must go on, a few had learned / so will
love, and, others / had learned, so much art.”
Driskell writes an “Epitaph For
Colonel Sanders” (whose body we all know is buried in Cave Hill), who was so
smart “to retail each spicy secret!” Driskell’s poems also can be biting (no
pun intended), as in the one for the Colonel’s wife, Claudia, whose all too
brief inscription “reads as if they’d said, ‘fuck it, let’s just throw her
bones into this old bucket.’”
More on new poems by Kathleen Driskell (center below) next time.
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