The Orchard (American Poets Continuum)

Brigit Pegeen Kelly's allusive, mythic, and rhythmic poetry shines here. Her lush writing was out of step with both the formalism and the free verse popular in the late 90s, and very distant from the more experimental and hybrid poetics popular right now. Pegeen Kelly is also rich in the natural imaginary which grounds and expands mythic and dream imaginary in some sensual space. Domestic and richly mythic, formal but not stated. Traditional but not closed to the world. Great work.

The Orchard is now one of my favorite books of poems. I will come back to this over and over.

Kelly's poems are so thick, with meditations from nature, from dreams, that just spiral through joy and horror and song, leaving you a little out of breath with each read, but one of those breathing sessions after a well-needed, brisk walk in the cold, your nose running, having just given yourself a long-put off action. The title poem, for example, is probably one of the most exquisite dream poems I've ever read, so thoroughly engaging in its dream logic and sensoral immediacy.

Reading The Orchard by Brigit Pegeen Kelly is an indescribable experience, like listening to Rachmaninoff's Third Symphony or a Bach fugue. Stunned by hypnotic images, the reader is grabbed by the throat and ripped into a labyrinth of numinous voices, quickening classical statues, dripping mist, rotting fruit, flapping wings and a pulsing sense of the presence of music and danger. Kelly's poetry is breathtaking in its language and force. Reading one poem creates an insatiable thirst to read everything this remarkable poet has written.

Brigit Pegeen Kelly, The Orchard (BOA Editions, 2004)The Orchard is the kind of book one doesn't see too often these days; it's poetry that's "academic" in the trust sense of the word, thick almost to the point of unreadability with diction that's just this side of archaic, layer upon layer of symbolism, and all that sort of thing that makes high school and college English professors foam at the mouth. There is little doubt in my mind, having read this book, that Kelly is on the fast track to canonization; this is substantiated by The Orchard having been nominated for a National Book Critics' Circle Award this year. Because of all this, there's the temptation to compare her to poets already in the canon (there's certainly a good argument to be made for comparing her style and diction, and probably substance, to that of, say, Pound, or to a lesser extent Eliot). I'll try to avoid it, given the length limits I'm stuck with, but those with more room than I have might want to take a crack at it.The basic problem with the canon is that, while it's often beautiful work (as is the case here), it sometimes lets the simple factors of readability and accessibility fall by the wayside in order to be deep. The best poets who flirt with canonization-- Li-Young Lee is the one who springs immediately to mind-- have the depth and flavor, but also have that surface layer that says "here's a poem; if all you get out of it is what you see on the surface, that's okay." Kelly's work has a marked absence of this trait; the language itself almost seems to be pointing the reader toward the depths, saying "in order to get anything out of this poem, you'd best come armed with a knowledge of mythology, and an OED would probably help as well." Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but it's likely to turn away those not yet familiar with poetry these days; as we all know, at the turn of the twenty-first century, "those not yet familiar with poetry" is, well, almost everyone.Recommended for advanced readers. Newcomers to the scene might want to go with a little lighter reading.

I just love the place she has created on earth where her poems can happen.

Kelly provides a space filled with nature and life. There she explores life itself, birth, death and the cosmos. I found the poems to be meditative, yet they each offer a new peek into the human psyche often forgotten, for fear of facing and pondering it. I highly recommend this collection and plan to read it again and again to mine for more of what's there.

I haven't come across poetry like this before. It is contemporary in the literal sense of having been written by a contemporary poet, but it has a richness and gorgeousness of language I am tempted to describe as Baroque. There is a thin line between Baroque and over-the-top and I think Pegeen Kelly has stayed the right side of it. As for the nature of the poetry, it is mythical, timeless. We enter into dreamscapes of rising mist, autumnal gardens of rot and blown roses, a forest imbued with the spirit or spirits of a mutilated deer. As in all dreams, there is a vibrancy and a mysteriousness which grabs hold and won't quite let go. Which means returning and again returning to the poems. If you are sick of the straitjackets of irony and /or pretentiousness, read this book. Brigid Pegeen Kelly also has another collection out, SONGS, just as good and in the same vein .I don't believe there is anyone either side of the pond-or anywhere else, come to that- writing like this.