Summary

This collection of 20 poems is inspired by the human body. In anatomical detail these poems depict the body's beauty of structure, its rhythm of movement, its versatility of metaphor. This is not surprising, perhaps, for the work of a poet who is also a physical therapist.

In "What I Know" (p. 11) the poet helps his patient across a hospital lobby into the "breezy, sun-dotted day." She struggles with her walker, as the poet visualizes her impairment in himself, in a spiritual sense "unable to move or feel my right side." And the world's more global impairment, where each day violence is visited upon the "brave peacemakers and blessedly meek." "Tongue" (pp. 16-17) builds upon the earthy glossals, glottals and trills made by the muscles of speech to celebrate the expressive beauty of song, while remembering that the tongue is "flesh . . . first and last."

Kelly sticks closely to flesh in "Surface Anatomy" (pp. 21-22), in which he draws word-portraits of bones, including the greater trochanter of the femur, vertebral spinous processes, and patella, and in "Voluptuosity" (pp. 27-28), where he thanks God for the body's curves: "The body's curving comes / to the hand like the dry fields / rise to rain. . . "

Commentary

Many people believe we are made in God's image--not just God's ghost in the devil's machine, but the unitary biological package. If so, then we can learn something about God by examining the body and what goes on inside the body. Perhaps the best spiritual poetry begins with the body, rather than beginning with the Soul, or Love, or any other abstraction. Timothy Kelly's poems begin with the basics but, like toccatas and fugues, weave simplicity into complexity and complexity into insight.

Publisher

Floating Bridge Press

Place Published

Seattle

Edition

2005

Page Count

37