Word: poem
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...book ends with the title poem, "A Kiss in Space." We can see how this piece grew from a newspaper clipping about two cosmonauts, one gently kissing the other's cheek in zero gravity. As they return from space, we return from the book, with a felt promise that everything around us has meaning, connections, links. And this new perception leads us back to a new reality, back to "whatever Earth has become...
...have a confession to make. When I read poetry, I like to be romanced. I like a poem to take my hand, twirl me around, offer me wine and roses and seduce me into its satin-draped bedroom for the night. I want poetry to move me beyond myself. I want poetry to offer itself up to me body and soul and say "take me, love me and sigh because I am beautiful, sigh because your heart rips apart when I speak...
...title poem "Elegy for the Southern Drawl," placed strategically in the book's middle, is welcomingly sprinkled with the sounds of "yes'm," "no'm" and "hidey" as Jones transports his reader temporarily to the forklift, the Shoney's or the Appalachian foothills. But it is not all a happy remembrance. At several points, the speaker reveals his embarrassment, that "until fourth grade, [he] spoke rarely...
Jones draws connections throughout the collection to images in "Elegy," referring, for example, to the church language of "thous" and "thines." Within the "Elegy" are two amusing anecdotes of family euphemisms for persons' (NOT READABLE) of the collection, Jones presents a poem entitled "Sacrament for My Penis." Obviously no longer holding the reserve of his past, the speaker and Jones have voyaged to another side. The language, its accent and its vocabulary, have died, and Jones demonstrates in his last section his own personal growth from his southern drawl...
...verbal form, an object made out of words, as compensation for urgent, but amorphous dilemmas: the "mess" of remembering joy amidst sorrow or of loving the wrong person or of grief. Of course it knows that its kind of compensation is immensely limited and circumscribed, that no mere poem will bring back childhood or a dead friend; such knowledge forces it back, time and again, on the only trick it knows: namely, constructing a gorgeous verbal contraption. The mystery is how such a contraption could ever work: but it does work, at least for the brief span of its operations...