The House of Blue Light is the second collection of
autobiographical "memory poems" by
Catholic-schoolboy-gone-bad-turned-poet-made-good David Kirby, a
stand-up comic of verse if ever there was one: "in Stardust
Memories ... these wise space aliens who visit Earth ... tell
[Woody Allen] that if he really wants to serve humanity, / he
should tell funnier jokes -- wait, that's my duty, / I think,
that's my public duty! Because sooner or later, / we all turn
upside down".
Wearing both heart and wit on his sleeve, Kirby confides in
longish narrative poems events he actually or vicariously
experienced -- as a child, a teen, a young man, and now -- as well
as some future scenes he imagines. Literary theorists Jacques
Derrida and Roland Barthes; Little Richard and Muhammed Ali; Herman
Melville, James Dickey, and Henry James; friends, family, personal
heroes, and acquaintances, including the Ah Oui Girl of Paris and
Tige Watley's Whoah of Baton Rouge, are all equally alive in
Kirby's poems.
As Walt Whitman did, Kirby offers a first-person speaker as a
proxy for everyone else ("Who, including ourselves, / knows what we
know and when we know it?"), achieving a unity and accessible
authenticity rare in poetry. A fun house, "a mishmash for sure",
The House of Blue Light is a delightfully entertaining, irreverent,
erudite collection of commentary piling upon commentary that brings
us "that one element so largely absent / from our quotidian
existence, i.e., surprise".
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