Not This Island Music

by Robert Kelly

To the
I am concerned to examine in practice how through the composition of poems the organs of enlightenment begin to open, begin to work for the benefit of all. For the benefit of all, not just the talker, the poem shapes itself in syllables, breath patterns, deep metabolic rhythms it borrows from the writer – signal of what is personal (body) transcending itself into what is sharing, shared...
―RK

Genres: Poetry

182 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1987

About the author

Kelly has published more than fifty books of poetry and prose, including Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993 (1995) and a collection of short fictions, A Transparent Tree (1985). Many were published by the Black Sparrow Press. He also edited the anthology A Controversy of Poets (1965).Kelly was of great help to the Hungryalist group of poets of India during the trial of Malay Roychoudhury,with whom he had correspondence,now archived at Kolkata.

Kelly received the Los Angeles Times First Annual Book Award (1980) for Kill the Messenger Who Brings Bad News and the American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation (1991) for In Time.

Reviews

[Claudia Putnam · Rating 3 out of 5]

The rating is for the collection. Plenty of 5-star pieces in here. But many, also, that ought to have been left in the journal or wherever he keeps his drafts, snippets, musings, whatever. It's not necessary to publish EVERY scribble you ever scribbled!

I was looking for something in particular--I read an intriguing conversation between Kelly and Clayton Eshleman in American Poetry Review some years ago in which Kelly said something to the effect that we should approach myths backward. That one could find Atlantis by looking for where it had risen. I was hoping he'd done some writing in this vein. But he has a kabillion books, probably due to his unwillingness to pick and choose among his poems, so I wasn't sure where to start. Anyway, what I was looking for wasn't here.

That's not why I was disappointed in this book though. There's a lot of stuff that explains stuff to you, a lot of work that argues with you--I don't mind polemical poems, but these don't work. I know because my own journal is full of them and they haven't found their form any more than these pieces of Kelly's have.

The pieces that do work... at least one is highly derivative of Eliot, but still works, so who cares. We all have Eliot echoing in our head.

Little Office for the Feast of St. John is a little wonder:

......and the farmer's daughter
barely blooded herself and now smeared with his
for her sake decanted

....

A saint is an extremity of passion
or dispassion...
....
It is an honor to think about them,
dancer and danced, the hip and the head.

....

Marriage Considered as an Arrangement of Objects in Space could be read at weddings.

Certainly many poems here I'll come back to.

[Tommy · Rating 5 out of 5]

not only is he brilliant, he's my uncle.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book, as always, from Kelly, with the concluding poem/manifesto/meditation extraordinary.