Bell 8

by Rick Lyons, C.K. Williams (Foreword)

" a book populated by real human beings, living real human lives in a real world; a world in which the simple, stifled cries of ordinary suffering and ordinary exaltation move with the music of an authentic and original voice. Rick Lyon has brought forth a disarming, compelling, and finally startling work, precise, illuminating, moving."―C.K. Williams

Genres: Poetry

79 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just snatched this from my bookshelf. Inside was a warm note to me dated in 1997, thanking me for setting up a reading for him at one of the bookshops I once worked in. Oddly I don't remember him nor the reading. Which seems very strange to me, now that I've spent some time with the poems (almost 30 years later!), because I find them tremendously moving and very well done. As near as I can tell this is Lyon's only book, which was a prize winner. He went to good schools and published in good places, had some nice awards, but seems to have disappeared in the literary world. The note says he spent much of his life running a ferry on the Connecticut River, and the poems are mostly placed around Essex, Connecticut. The few entries on line seem to indicate that he married late, and died shortly afterward in 2017. He was a year younger than me.

This book was one of the prize winners for the small BOA contest, and is introduced by the late C. K. Williams. Williams does a good job setting the tone of the book--sad, intensely observed, overwhelmed by a sense of loss, but yet with small moments of joy. Most of the poems are short, often with long lines. The language is plain spoken, but can go off in a flourish when the material calls for it.

Many of the poems seem to lament the gentrification of his town and his riverfront. Here's one called "The Island" that seems to have much of the spirit of the book:

Reflected on the water, the lights are flamelike, flickering
in orange swatches where the wind ripples the moving tidal cove.
The long shapes beneath the dock's lighting are like torches
whose motions make companions in the night.
In the winter stillness, the flames flicker and burn.
For all the flowering of houses being built, the boats coming and going in summer
the changes and commotion in town, our daily lives,
we'd seem misguided, mostly, but hopeful.
I hadn't noticed till now all we've lost. The seven lights in line on the island,
their strange friendly ceaseless flaring.

I find myself felling bad tonight that I had actually been around this poet and these poems but that whatever cares were on me, I hadn't remembered them. And that the book sat on my shelf for a few decades before I got to it. Still, I am glad I finally did.

[Steven Logan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommended.