Spiritual Exercises

by Robert Kelly

Poems evoke the mystical and emotional experiences of the author

Genres: Poetry

164 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

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

[Keith Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kelly is always pushing himself in his poems -- thinking through them, pushing the language in ways he hasn't previously. And he has had a long interest in the great spiritual questions. Occasionally that makes his poems feel hermetic, sealed against an uninitiated reader. But it can also liberate him to do other things, to suddenly explore clarity with an equal rigor.

Not sure I've ever read a book where the dedication gives a clear interpretive clue:

her collarbone

first bone formed
or shapely rod
from which the Temple's
curtain hung

And that mix of spirituality and sensuality is the center of the book, even of the two long and difficult poems. Here's one of those little poems that grows naturally out of all the difficult work he has been doing. This one's called "Reasons for Hope":

There are slender places inside words
where the shade temperature really defines
the kind of day we later say it's been.
In these places there are arches
which, when we walk around down there, look
unconscionably big, like the apses
in Constantine's basilica. In word
a space, in space an arch, in arch
an apse, the apse wall filled with windows
through which Roman landscapes speak,
wind or something stirring deep grass,
a solitary traveler hurrying towards town.

That wonderful image is why Kelly was labelled one of the original poets of "the deep image" (this was before that term was taken to be used by very different, although still interesting , poets).

[Tommy · Rating 5 out of 5]

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