the house of blue light by David Kirby

I must gush about this book. What wonderful poetry!! If you don't read poetry, or think it is beyond you, or that you won't like it, I'm here to tell you that David Kirby is a marvel. One of the poems in this book had me laughing so hard, pop came out my nose. That can't often be said about poetry.

I think, first of all, that David Kirby doesn't believe in periods. If he had to give up any punctuation mark--no question about it, the period would be gone. And that is the marvel of these poems--they just run on in a kind of riff on whatever topic David chooses to expound on and you can't help being sucked in and go gladly along for the ride.

I want to give you a taste of one of his poems. They are all quite long, but here are two stanzas that tickled my fancy. And a note on this text, I don't know how to make it work, but every other line should be tab indented. Enjoy!!

Catholic Teenager from Hell Goes to Italy

Jock DuBois found out in our senior year
that one out of every seven Americans was Catholic,
so he figured if each of us would rise up
on a secret signal and kill seven non-Catholics,
we could take over the whole country in,
like, three or four minutes, a hypothesis
that cost us several jobs,
since Jock couldn't stop talking about his plan,
and even devoutly Catholic bosses
had no desire to see their employees
doff their brightly-colored paper caps
or throw down their mops and brooms
and start killing customers who had come in
for a burger, shake, and biggie fry,
not to have their throats cut by pimply fanatics.

That didn't stop Jock from talking,
even though I said the plan might work in America,
but what about the rest of the world,
including our immediate neighbors?
It just didn't seem like something
the Canadians would take lying down.
I wasn't sure I wanted Catholics
to run the world anyway, even though
JFK had just been elected president,
and some people were saying he was already
getting secret orders from the Vatican,
and others were passing out what they called
"Kennedy quarters," the ones
where Washington is wearing a papal skullcap
they'd painted on with red nail polish.