"One Strand River" is affecting poetry — when it's not too esoteric

"The One-Strand River"

by Richard Kenney

Knopf, 177 pp., $26.95

Richard Kenney begins his new book of poems, "The One Strand River," with a nursery rhyme showing the origin of the book's rather mysterious title:

Gray goose and gander

Waft your wings together

And carry the good king's daughter

Over the one-strand river.

The rhyme doesn't really clarify what the phrase means, but at least it gives us a common starting point. From there, Kenney commences the 11-part journey of his book with his own nursery rhyme-like poem, "Pen, Line," which resonates with the book's title. "One Strand River" is the first book by Kenney, a University of Washington professor and Port Townsend resident, in 14 years — it encompasses a wide range of styles, tones and subject matter. Yet phrases, words and allusions keep echoing throughout the text to offer a sense of order and continuity.

Kenney's verbal skills are daunting. He can reprise the punning, tongue-twisting music of Gerard Manley Hopkins ("Sun-hung, while the world spins under, since ... ") and the probing rhetoric of John Donne ("How many sublunaries dance/ On the perch of a pin?"). He's adept with form, from sonnets, heroic couplets, ballad stanzas and terza rima, to those basic nursery-rhyme ditties he likes. I was wowed by his descriptions in "Rear View," a portrait of a guy on a Harley barreling through Montana:

He's passing: he's taking the road like a dog on a leg,

Or the flatulent jump of a Thompson gun ...Condor neck, gray mane a coronal storm

Around his plastic yarmulke — the logos

That pate sport relate mostly to the holocaust

Between his legs, the verbs for which he's said "to be born."

I like Kenney's writing best when he distills his images to absolute clarity. These images from "The Winter" stopped me cold:

"The stars withdraw their needles from the night.

The moon, a melted compress, cools the west.

The dark unbandages the earth. Inert,

Awake, we touch a face. What is the truest

Thing, Time or Love? ... "

Too often, though, I found the ether of Kenney's intellectual playing field a little too rarefied for me. Interestingly, in "New," the writer laments the obtuseness of astronomical terms and complains: "Why can't they speak English? What use is a moon/ you can't court by?" That's how I felt when I sometimes got lost in the tangle of Kenny's Olympian vocabulary, not sure where I was headed or why. Even my dictionaries were defeated a few times. Deinonychid? Rockaddle? No mention of them in Kenney's cryptic end notes, either. Kenney expects a lot from his readers.

At 177 pages, "The One-Strand River" holds a lot of poems and a long period of Kenney's development under one cover — maybe too much to tie comfortably together. I was a little thrown off by the bantering tone of some of the political and war poems, in contrast to the soul-touched sincerity of some of the family poems, of birth and death. Here's one I find unforgettable.

Office Visit

On the day he died, not ninety, quite,

partially blind, in chronic pain and jacket

and tie my dad said no energy. He just

had none. A courteous old guy,

thought the doctor. The contained kind. Quiet.

Then the doctor, perhaps educated

elsewhere, checking his watch, suggested

Exercise. You might try yoga.