Kathleen
Driskell’s Next Door To The Dead (University
Press of Kentucky)
In the famous final paragraph of James
Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” snow was falling “upon every part of the lonely
churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted
on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the
barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through
the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all
the living and the dead.”
“The Dead,” of course, is prose but
poetic prose, and in it the quiet calm of snow covers both the dead and the
living. In poet Kathleen Driskell’s new collection, Next Door To The Dead, we again find ourselves in a cemetery, the
one next door to Driskell’s home in a converted country church just outside
Louisville.
But instead of snow in the “sleet and
darkening day,” it is buzzards among the 112 tombstones in her poem, “In Praise.” A “dark congregation” roost in the bare
branches … in worn-shine coats … pallbearers … [a] greasy black prayer-circle.”
And instead of lamenting the paralysis of the dead and the living, here the
poet praises death, reserving her “highest praise” for the “dark angel” who squats
atop the monument of a mother of six, “all dead and lain before she.”
Like Joyce, Driskell in these 80 pages
explores death, the meeting point between life and death, and the process of
remembering the dead—which would probably be impossible not to do if
you were a poet who lived next door to a cemetery.
And like Joyce, Driskell is a story-teller, one whose lines are both accessible
and filled with intensely vivid imagery. This poem, “In Praise,” is ironic, rather than
ghoulish, for it expresses her gratitude for a perhaps less than tender mercy—the
removal of road-kill (a dead doe) which has been lying in a culvert for a week and
is finally being lifted into the “grave weeping sky” by the buzzards.
More on Kathleen Driskell’s
new poems next time.
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