Kerry Shawn Keys. Night Flight. Rockford, MI: PRESA :S: PRESS, 2012.

Kerry Shawn Keys is a poet of spirit and soul, ofdeepest experience. Mystical, witty, iconoclastic, erudite, sensual, harrowingand funny, he is also the unlikeliest combination of energies to inhabit asingle sensibility.  Indeed, inmany of his previous books, these energies occasionally seem more at war thanin concert, despite the many good poems in them. But here, in Night Flight, his latest of severaldozen books, he seems to have journeyed to Robert Johnson’s crossroads and comeback blessed, because everything, or very nearly everything, works: the surreal,the absurd, the elegiac and the mystical combining in what is nothing short ofa ravishing book.

The deep plunge into experience, whether that ofthe woods and streams of his native Pennsylvania, the former ghetto of Vilnius orthe slums and hotspots of India and Brazil (one ear to the gutters of themartyred, the other to the dizzying dance of the deities), is driven byrelentless rhythms, astonishing vocabulary (and almost Poundian range ofreference), humor and pathos. Here, reflecting on the plight of the poet(specifically the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa):

poor Pessoa, one reads as one might read

the works of a disconsolate waterbug

confined by timidity to the corner

of a kitchen spending a lifetime

telling us how not to live. . .      (“Blue Sky”)

Or here on spring and the urge for renewal:

And so, intimate stranger, I must lay the redrug out for you again,

my secret sharer, my friend, my shy,sugar-tongued pen,

and to the deserted parchment of thecountryside, invoke your return.

Come C.O.D, come vagrant, come fluorescentlyflagrant,

Raven-quill, hummingbird beak, St. Jerome at hispeak,

seed-pressed, oily ink in hand, rowing the airany way you can.

I want to inscribe new leaves on the blue treeof the wind. (“Crocuses In Spring Incited This Paean”)

Or here, simply a reflection on childhood andmother tongue, the coming to words:

Moon Moon again he cries

excited as his father always

to reproduce that drone of sound

the golden roundness of which

blind Borges envied the English. (“The WhiteGoddess”)

Then there is the deep throb and rural bleaknessof “Elegy For Kathy Leonard” that begins “Her stepfather killed her with theback of an ax,” and later invokes her:

Tonight, starlight foxtrots my classmate’sgravestone

like sequins of pyrite over the snowwhite gown

 shewas to fishtail in at the junior prom.

It’s twenty years and then twenty years again,

and maybe twenty miles the way the crow flies

to the Susquehanna where dreary men still droptheir lines

Through a wishing well of ice and wind

trying to latch onto something akin to the alienswish

of her dress, the sparkle of this stone, theSphinx-like

Quicksilver of her smile. . .

Or the comical self-parody of rural living in “WheelsGet Tired of Being Mechanical Forces” describing a dilapidated cabin with twocar tires holding down a leak patch on the roof that finally come down unceremoniouslyone spring, ending:

                         But only when my cat got kerplunked

by the tire sliding off the roof did the satorisink in

That the real reason for the invention of the wheel

was some mystical albeit teleological connectionbetween

animals, leaky roofs, and a jerry-rigged excusefor a poem.

Or the theological fireworks of the All and Nothingof “The Left Hand Speaks,” dedicated to Tomas Transtromer, that ends

Not long ago, hearing The Sorrow Gondola,

my righthand man paid tribute in a poem.

Now listen. Look. Lightly laden with all of life,

transparent and black in the evening light, I amrowing.

I am rowing this gondola whirling like a dervish

in an endless circle toward God.

Obviously sound, often lush sound, is animportant part of a Keys poem, along with story and image. Cadence, internalrhyme and alliteration, sometimes even joke-rhyme, are all part of his Sufidance of veils and spells. And then, sometimes, he will let a poem float downthe page with the apparent artlessness of absolute mastery:

Sweet Robin

Sweet Robin,

how long it’s been

since you came

with your red napkin

to my table to dine.

The sun’s gone down

ten thousand times,

the moon risen the same.

Sweet Robin,

bloody on the lawn

ear lying

sideways to nothing,

night tumbling

through your brain,

and mine.

There are 57 poems in this very large littlebook whose rich diversity and haunting qualities I can only hope to hintat.  I conclude by quoting in fullthe first poem in the book, one that, for me, displays the wealth of Mr. Keys’gifts for synthesizing complex experience of both inner and outer worlds. To meit is emblematic of the sum of the NightFlight experience, reminding me of a phrase Robert Penn Warren once used inpraise of another spiritual poet, saying he had been “denied nothing and sparednothing.”

The Ache

the river flows like a silver quill into aninkwell

of woods and words

fording evening

as it deepens

an old woman no morethan a synonym for snow

tunes her stone bow

to death’s dark song

as it quickens

the quarter moon grins over lush leaves andlistens

to the frogs peep

the decoys dive

the carps’ dreams

and a blacksnake glistens down the sycamore’sskin

like a rainbow

into water

into nothing

while the river contrails through the blueshivering vein

of your aching

Time nevergreen

fish belly-up

until at last you understand the majesticindifference of

the Promised Land

its blue flowers

quiet horses

the rising sun