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Song
STATED FIRST EDITION IN VERY NICE CONDITION. DUST JACKET HAS MINOR SCUFFING & EDGE WEAR. BOOK IS VERY NICE. NO MARKING OR WRITING NOTED IN BOOK.
90 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 75 reviews
November 18, 2012
I read "Song" in graduate school and immediately bought this book, but never made it all the way through. Now I am ashamed of my graduate school self, because this book? INCREDIBLE. It's not always easy to get through Kelly's poems, because they're very dense, but they're also immaculately crafted. The first and last poems in this book might be two of the best I've ever read. The last poem should be a must-read for all poets, especially those who work in longer forms. It's so spell-binding I'm planning to retype and analyze how in the world someone actually made a poem like that.
December 1, 2020
The heart dies of this sweetness.
May 4, 2009
One of my favorite books, ever.
June 27, 2013
This is how it's done, y'all.
December 31, 2014
In Song, Brigit Pegeen Kelly has crafted elaborate and carefully weighed lines of poetry, some more formal than others, but all with care and considerable work; however, each poem in this collection is marked by an almost elemental pain, something natural and raw: a profound sadness, a kind of waiting and watching. Is it our destruction of the natural world? Yes, in part, but it is also the reality of death that colors all things. It is standing among the ruined gravestones, our monuments to impermanence, and hearing how life still surrounds us. It is the dignity which our natural world shows in dying. Call it ecopoetry or not, but it is beautiful in its mournful celebration of grace.
January 14, 2010
Every time I reread this book, or a few poems, I always have to start with the first and then the last poems, "Song" and "Three Cows and the Moon": they're amazing. I think they're my favorites, but then I start in and (re)discover more poems to love: of course there's "Of Royal Issue," but also the one about everything being a bird once (can't recall the name right now...and my copy is in my office.
Among so many other things I like about Kelly's poems, about her craft, specifically is her use of simple image and language to create complex constructions that somehow transform into immense mythical visions in the close space front of you. She makes leaps that on first read seem like simple repetitions of basic sentence constructions; these repeated lines, however, build up tone, layer the poem so beautifully that by the time you finish the poem you're so far removed from the simple image/story at the beginning...it's hard to believe you've moved so far away.
These are important poems. Worth reading over and over.
Among so many other things I like about Kelly's poems, about her craft, specifically is her use of simple image and language to create complex constructions that somehow transform into immense mythical visions in the close space front of you. She makes leaps that on first read seem like simple repetitions of basic sentence constructions; these repeated lines, however, build up tone, layer the poem so beautifully that by the time you finish the poem you're so far removed from the simple image/story at the beginning...it's hard to believe you've moved so far away.
These are important poems. Worth reading over and over.
July 29, 2008
When you read these poems, it will be as if you have entered another world- but an inner world...of dark images and half-remembered music. I am at a total loss for words to describe or even think about this book. Read the opening (title) poem and you will know what I mean.
July 2, 2009
This is a gorgeous book. Kelly's lines have a grace and momentum that is utterly captivating. Her poems are plainspoken in the best sense, layered like prayer and as hypnotic as well told story. I am, quite simply, completely enamored with this book, and I suspect I will be for a long while yet.
November 15, 2007
Myth, surrealism, some poems in formal arrangements, some pushed to prose; a world filled with rich harmony and strangeness, fresh vocabulary and uncanny image.
March 12, 2008
One of the most beautiful collections of poetry ever written.
August 5, 2008
This book is exquisite and utterly devastating.
January 11, 2009
Everyone of these three stars is for the title poem to this book. "Song" is/will be a classic.
The book is good too:
Themes: Death, aggression, violence, passion, restlessness, un-fulfillment, restraint, savageness, maleness.
The tone of Song is oftentimes somber. It works in contrasts with many of the violent images which builds a tension that is inherent to the book's primary themes and subject. Primarily the subject is the violence and aggression that occurs from imposed restraint or un-fulfillment. Many of the characters are everyday people or young people who act out their frustrations and fill their personal void by committing acts of violence. The tension the tone creates reflects the tension in society.
The book's opening, and also title, poem tells of a group of young boys who steal a girl's pet goat and beheads it, hanging the head for all to see. The narrator tells the poem as a story or recounting of events. The poem begins: "Listen: there was a goat's head hanging by ropes in a tree. / All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it / felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing / the song of the nightbird. The first word "Listen:" sets the story mode and the informal, subdued tone. The opening line introduces violence but the second and third lines also introduce a somberness and sadness to the tone. The image itself is surreal. She personifies a dead creature to the extent that the emotion of the tragedy is conveyed rather than the violence.
The little girl the goat belongs to becomes the narrator's focus, and the community's shock over the incident, and their concern to protect the girl. The relationship between the goat and the girls is established: "...each morning she woke / To give the bleating goat his pail of warm milk. She sang / Him songs about girls with ropes and cooks in boats." Every morning the girl looked forward to seeing the "bleating" goat connects the girl and the goat. When the goat disappears after being taken by the boys unknown to the girl, "...She knew that someone / Had stolen the goat and that he had come to harm. She called / To Him." After she realizes the goat is gone, the poem turn to the community's reaction:
...Then somebody found the head
Hanging in a tree by the school. They hurried to take
These things away so that the girl would not see them
They hurried to raise money to buy the girl another goat.
They hurried to find the boys who had done this, to hear
to hear them say it was a joke...
By hiding the goat, replacing it, and looking for the boys and expecting it all to be a joke, the community is reacting impotently. They are denying reality and trying to protect everyone involved from it including themselves. A turn in the poem occurs when the narrator once again addresses the reader informally and changes focus from the girl to the boys: "But Listen: here is the point. The boys thought to have / Their fun and be done with it. It was harder work than they / Had imagined, this silly sacrifice, but they finished the job, / Whistling as they as they washed their large hands in the dark." The scene establishes the act more than a joke. In fact, it's depicted as an endeavor. One that took time and effort. One that they casually whistled to themselves while committing. The scene is developed more with a mix of narration and surrealism. The goat head is said to have sung to the boys before the killing, during, and after. It becomes omnipresent in the boy's lives, but it is a haunting than is not necessarily the damning curse one may expect. The poem ends with an almost positive assessment of the boy's act in regard to their lives. The goat's song is described: The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother's call. / Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song / Is sweet It is sweet. The heart dies of his sweetness." These final surreal lines connect the goat head as a nurturing presence rather than damning. Also, the speaker emphasizes "no, no, not cruel at all." The last sentence is ironic. One must believe that act of violence killed something good inside the kids, especially with no consequence or punishment, but the tone and word choice "sweetness" makes the line appear to say that the act also blesses the boys. The poem ends in ambiguity, but is thought provoking and does touch on the darker emotions present in everyman's soul. The arc of Kelly's book addresses the ambiguity set by the title poem.
Song is divided into four parts. Each part addresses the aforementioned themes, but as the reader progresses, more is explained by the poems' speakers and the disturbing themes and subjects more directly addressed. For instance, "The White Pilgrim: Old Christian Cemetery." Once again Kelley features boys committing alleged mindless violence. In the speaker's dreams the boys vandalize a graveyard where they saved for last the stone of the "White Pilgrim." He is a character who fashioned himself after one of the riders of the Apocalypse but in reality is a fanatical right wing country preacher. Yet the kids feared and respected them. The cemetery is eventually repaired and the may be "more beautiful than before." In the poem, the narrator explains the boys’ motivation:
So that night they went to the cemetery.
It was cold, but they were drunk and perhaps
They did not feel it. The cemetery is close
To town, but no one heard them.
The boys are part of a larger destruction, but this is beyond
What they can imagine. War in Heaven
and the damage is ours. The birds came to feed
On what is left. You can see them always
around old Christian.
The speaker alludes to Christianity and the presence of violence even in Heaven and the trickle down effect to humanity. And there is a lack of imagination on the boys’ part. Like in "Song" the boys are not dealt consequences but the reasoning for their actions is explained more. The boys are acting to fill a void they cannot explain nor can they find any themselves any way to fill it other than vandalism. Also they are acting in reaction to war in Heaven, something they cannot possibly understand.
The speaker does specifically explain the motivation behind these acts of violence in "Distractions of Fish and Flowers in the Kill." Once again, young boys are the subjects. They are burning ants with using the sun through a magnifying glass. The speaker explains their thirst for violence, and society's, by stating: "The color of fire grows, grows in profusion. Fireweed is purple, / As in shrouds as in to destroy or put an end to. / This we understand... / the idea that harm can hasten / The coming of good. That rain can make a lasting forgetfulness. " Here the speaker tells the reader that violence is the simplest solution that the unimaginative human mind can devise for its problems. When considering that violence is portrayed as the solution too Heaven's problems also, the notion makes sense. Toward the ending of the book, the speaker does give another choice that violence. In "Petition" the speaker asks for patience, and repeats the word "let" several times. The speaker wants society to allow things to be as they are and to allow time to work:
Let the fetid smell of bone meal
Be the body unlocking
As the river does, slowing to a hazy laze
...as the wide wheeled yellow tractors
Roll along the highway ,
Stalling traffic in their wakes
...like the balls dropping
softly into our mitts, let
The willow's love of water -
its dark and beaded rain-
Be the only storm we long for.
The speaker's use of nature images like the tree drinking water to be the only goal or storm humanity wishes for is disarming. There is no conflict, only acceptance of the natural order of things. Also, the images of the slow tractor in traffic, a baseball game, and the smell of bone meal in a lazy haze draw an acceptance of time and the rejection of forcing a hasty resolution to a problem. In this poem, the speaker uses her imagination to suggest another solution to fulfill humanity's urges rather than the easiest, most-un-imaginative, and destructive solution of violence.
Song's surreal images convey the themes of violence, fulfillment, and the darker corners of the human animal's psyche in a fashion unique to surrealism. To go that deep into the human id requires new images. The somber tone of the poems contrasting with those violent surreal images mimics the tension within humanity that the speaker believes results in violence. "Petition" is one of the few peaceful poems in the book. Here, tone and imagery match, they are in harmony. Kelly's Song is a fascinating and entertaining treatise on disharmony and violence.
The book is good too:
Themes: Death, aggression, violence, passion, restlessness, un-fulfillment, restraint, savageness, maleness.
The tone of Song is oftentimes somber. It works in contrasts with many of the violent images which builds a tension that is inherent to the book's primary themes and subject. Primarily the subject is the violence and aggression that occurs from imposed restraint or un-fulfillment. Many of the characters are everyday people or young people who act out their frustrations and fill their personal void by committing acts of violence. The tension the tone creates reflects the tension in society.
The book's opening, and also title, poem tells of a group of young boys who steal a girl's pet goat and beheads it, hanging the head for all to see. The narrator tells the poem as a story or recounting of events. The poem begins: "Listen: there was a goat's head hanging by ropes in a tree. / All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it / felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing / the song of the nightbird. The first word "Listen:" sets the story mode and the informal, subdued tone. The opening line introduces violence but the second and third lines also introduce a somberness and sadness to the tone. The image itself is surreal. She personifies a dead creature to the extent that the emotion of the tragedy is conveyed rather than the violence.
The little girl the goat belongs to becomes the narrator's focus, and the community's shock over the incident, and their concern to protect the girl. The relationship between the goat and the girls is established: "...each morning she woke / To give the bleating goat his pail of warm milk. She sang / Him songs about girls with ropes and cooks in boats." Every morning the girl looked forward to seeing the "bleating" goat connects the girl and the goat. When the goat disappears after being taken by the boys unknown to the girl, "...She knew that someone / Had stolen the goat and that he had come to harm. She called / To Him." After she realizes the goat is gone, the poem turn to the community's reaction:
...Then somebody found the head
Hanging in a tree by the school. They hurried to take
These things away so that the girl would not see them
They hurried to raise money to buy the girl another goat.
They hurried to find the boys who had done this, to hear
to hear them say it was a joke...
By hiding the goat, replacing it, and looking for the boys and expecting it all to be a joke, the community is reacting impotently. They are denying reality and trying to protect everyone involved from it including themselves. A turn in the poem occurs when the narrator once again addresses the reader informally and changes focus from the girl to the boys: "But Listen: here is the point. The boys thought to have / Their fun and be done with it. It was harder work than they / Had imagined, this silly sacrifice, but they finished the job, / Whistling as they as they washed their large hands in the dark." The scene establishes the act more than a joke. In fact, it's depicted as an endeavor. One that took time and effort. One that they casually whistled to themselves while committing. The scene is developed more with a mix of narration and surrealism. The goat head is said to have sung to the boys before the killing, during, and after. It becomes omnipresent in the boy's lives, but it is a haunting than is not necessarily the damning curse one may expect. The poem ends with an almost positive assessment of the boy's act in regard to their lives. The goat's song is described: The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother's call. / Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song / Is sweet It is sweet. The heart dies of his sweetness." These final surreal lines connect the goat head as a nurturing presence rather than damning. Also, the speaker emphasizes "no, no, not cruel at all." The last sentence is ironic. One must believe that act of violence killed something good inside the kids, especially with no consequence or punishment, but the tone and word choice "sweetness" makes the line appear to say that the act also blesses the boys. The poem ends in ambiguity, but is thought provoking and does touch on the darker emotions present in everyman's soul. The arc of Kelly's book addresses the ambiguity set by the title poem.
Song is divided into four parts. Each part addresses the aforementioned themes, but as the reader progresses, more is explained by the poems' speakers and the disturbing themes and subjects more directly addressed. For instance, "The White Pilgrim: Old Christian Cemetery." Once again Kelley features boys committing alleged mindless violence. In the speaker's dreams the boys vandalize a graveyard where they saved for last the stone of the "White Pilgrim." He is a character who fashioned himself after one of the riders of the Apocalypse but in reality is a fanatical right wing country preacher. Yet the kids feared and respected them. The cemetery is eventually repaired and the may be "more beautiful than before." In the poem, the narrator explains the boys’ motivation:
So that night they went to the cemetery.
It was cold, but they were drunk and perhaps
They did not feel it. The cemetery is close
To town, but no one heard them.
The boys are part of a larger destruction, but this is beyond
What they can imagine. War in Heaven
and the damage is ours. The birds came to feed
On what is left. You can see them always
around old Christian.
The speaker alludes to Christianity and the presence of violence even in Heaven and the trickle down effect to humanity. And there is a lack of imagination on the boys’ part. Like in "Song" the boys are not dealt consequences but the reasoning for their actions is explained more. The boys are acting to fill a void they cannot explain nor can they find any themselves any way to fill it other than vandalism. Also they are acting in reaction to war in Heaven, something they cannot possibly understand.
The speaker does specifically explain the motivation behind these acts of violence in "Distractions of Fish and Flowers in the Kill." Once again, young boys are the subjects. They are burning ants with using the sun through a magnifying glass. The speaker explains their thirst for violence, and society's, by stating: "The color of fire grows, grows in profusion. Fireweed is purple, / As in shrouds as in to destroy or put an end to. / This we understand... / the idea that harm can hasten / The coming of good. That rain can make a lasting forgetfulness. " Here the speaker tells the reader that violence is the simplest solution that the unimaginative human mind can devise for its problems. When considering that violence is portrayed as the solution too Heaven's problems also, the notion makes sense. Toward the ending of the book, the speaker does give another choice that violence. In "Petition" the speaker asks for patience, and repeats the word "let" several times. The speaker wants society to allow things to be as they are and to allow time to work:
Let the fetid smell of bone meal
Be the body unlocking
As the river does, slowing to a hazy laze
...as the wide wheeled yellow tractors
Roll along the highway ,
Stalling traffic in their wakes
...like the balls dropping
softly into our mitts, let
The willow's love of water -
its dark and beaded rain-
Be the only storm we long for.
The speaker's use of nature images like the tree drinking water to be the only goal or storm humanity wishes for is disarming. There is no conflict, only acceptance of the natural order of things. Also, the images of the slow tractor in traffic, a baseball game, and the smell of bone meal in a lazy haze draw an acceptance of time and the rejection of forcing a hasty resolution to a problem. In this poem, the speaker uses her imagination to suggest another solution to fulfill humanity's urges rather than the easiest, most-un-imaginative, and destructive solution of violence.
Song's surreal images convey the themes of violence, fulfillment, and the darker corners of the human animal's psyche in a fashion unique to surrealism. To go that deep into the human id requires new images. The somber tone of the poems contrasting with those violent surreal images mimics the tension within humanity that the speaker believes results in violence. "Petition" is one of the few peaceful poems in the book. Here, tone and imagery match, they are in harmony. Kelly's Song is a fascinating and entertaining treatise on disharmony and violence.
July 21, 2020
utterly entangled with the world
January 3, 2021
Goddamn, goddamn, GODDAMN.
January 30, 2021
i think this is my favorite poetry collection that i own.
September 15, 2024
Child. We are done for
in the most remarkable ways.
in the most remarkable ways.
June 5, 2023
If I didn’t love the poem Song so much, maybe I’d like the collection Song a lot better
July 22, 2014
You know from the first poem, Song, that the poems in this collection are going to take you to a darker place than most. Song, a poem about the head of a goat singing to its body, to the boys who have decapitated it as a joke.
Death and loss follow in most of the poems. Kelly uses death in nature, the dead goat mentioned above is followed by a dead deer, its legs up in the air, beside a bus stop. There is the cow that dies after giving birth, moving away from its calf before laying down to die. There are also surreal images, the statue that moves to the song of a sparrow, longing for the life it'll never have.
Unique images that take you to new, disturbing places within the soul. An excellent collection.
Death and loss follow in most of the poems. Kelly uses death in nature, the dead goat mentioned above is followed by a dead deer, its legs up in the air, beside a bus stop. There is the cow that dies after giving birth, moving away from its calf before laying down to die. There are also surreal images, the statue that moves to the song of a sparrow, longing for the life it'll never have.
Unique images that take you to new, disturbing places within the soul. An excellent collection.
December 27, 2014
I am not sure why Kelly is not more well known. My poetry professor (the late, great, sorely missed poet Jake Adam York) recommended I read it during a poetry class I took from him about ten years ago. I have read it many times, and I cannot quite figure out why the poems are so moving, yet at the same time disturbing. The title poem alone devastates me every time I read it...Kelly's use of imagery and narrative is like nothing I have ever read.
February 23, 2009
What praise hasn't been offered for this book? In one way, Kelly's poems explain why myths exist. An occasion for a goat head hanging across from a bus stop is extraordinary, and it is human nature to try and protect ourselves from this portent by telling a story about it. Kelly manages to combine a moment like this into one of dis-ease, love, and intensity.
April 12, 2009
Although Kelly is an interesting poet, this book disappoints primarily because the opening/title poem is AMAZING. It is one of my most favorite poems -- one of the best. Unfortunately, it is so good -- lyrical, moving, unforgettably powerful-- that the rest of the book pales by comparison. The rest of the work while good, just can't live up to this once-in-a-lifetime poem.
May 10, 2007
Pegeen Kelly has an uncanny knack for connecting narrative & geography through the use of simile. . . besides elucidating description, the comparisions she draws actually advance the story of the poem. . .
July 24, 2012
Kelly was new to me as a poet, recommended by a friend that I trust. Not disappointed in any way. Some brilliant moments, a lot of reflective moments. Definitely will keep her work on my to read lists whenever I encounter it. Highly recommended.
August 13, 2007
A good poet, but hard to enjoy her poems, I find.
September 12, 2008
Though I gave the book 4 stars in its entirety, I would give 5+ stars to the title poem - it is amazing, moving, magical.
August 1, 2011
So many memorable moments in these poems. I can't wait to come back to them again to rediscover their surprising syntax and symbolism.
August 17, 2012
Haunting and beautiful. I true classic. What else can I say?
November 2, 2016
why am I living in a city again? why am I not out in a silent field somewhere
April 25, 2014
I've never seen something so gruesome and visceral as death juxtaposed so wonderfully with something like beauty. The work speaks volumes for itself than I ever could. Fantastic read.
February 7, 2015
really a 4.5.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 75 reviews