One of Those Russian Novels

by Kevin Cantwell

Poetry. "The phrase 'Russian novel' suggests thickness, density, and richness. All those terms apply to Cantwell's poetry or, more precisely, to the life in the poems. These are active pieces that plunge into the thick of things and pulse with motion, regardless of whether the setting is past or present. They show as they describe or recollect, and they don't recollect in any apparent tranquility or with regret. 'A late cousin speaks,' walking and talking the life of addiction--the needle, coffee, cannabis, the white rock--that culminates in the recognition of happiness, however sordid, however self-isolating. Old friends reconnect at a convention's hotel bar, last to be seated and staying so far beyond closing that the management gives them an unsubtle hint, 'and yet we linger.' Three poems realize incidents from the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, a big paragraph of which is this book's epigraph. Poems on the deaths of artists and friends, even when they're very long gone, indeed--see 'Marlowe in Italy'--hail their subjects' follies and vices equally with their achievements. This is poetry teeming with light, darkness, color, movement, heat, cold, sound, and silence. Reading it is like watching a complicated, demanding movie or, in full consciousness, life--Ray Olson, Booklist.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2009

Reviews

[Rand]

Well, Cantwell makes literature life and life a well with a canted roof of the mouth raised so as to draw forth such sublimity that a reader might wonder which one of those Russian novels he wrote in the margins of. Kevin Cantwell is the finest poet in Georgia. Hell, all of the southeastern US for that matter.

Like all good and well cant, the poet could "never write what you can say, say what you can imply, nor imply when a wink will suffice" that is to say his verse churns virtue from parsimony and chucks the concept out if it sounds wrong. This is verse which sets, keeps, and resets pace.
Places and people and rudiments remarked upon, mourned, sung, or otherwise poeticized herein include: U. S. Grant, the Gulf of Mexico, friends, students, Leslie Norris, Richard Harris, Marlowe, spouse, son, father, mother-in-law, brother, baseball diamonds, cousin, Italy, addiction, loss, supper.

The final offering, "The Poet at Forty-Seven" would read as a rejoinder to David Foster Wallace's piece "Death Is Not The End" were Cantwell awarded for his works.

Cantwell is an "academic" poet but not in the same way as his brother-in-law, Ben Lerner is.

Recommended.

[Lorraine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost every poem in this collection is about death; from elegies for friends, family, and poets to musings on the author's own eventual mortality, this volume contains clear-eyed and sharply observed commentary on living knowing that we're all going to die.