Queen Of Terrors

In this fourth collection, Robert Kelly tracks the elusive subject of all narratives — the self stripped bare, even — into ever more personal territories. The stories share a common urge to break loose from the constraints of linear thought, employing cubist technique in the construction of experience. Gathered here are close to thirty works of varying style and length, but whether blazing a single page or sensuously occupying a novella's space, virtually every one tells of odd encounters with desire. The longest story, "The Red King," lies at the center of the book, a telling complement to the novella "Cities" collected in A Transparent Tree. This time, a gentle lion in the winter, re-inherits his own body. A second long work, "In Irish America," explores the immigrant experience of displacement in thirty-two prose-poems meant to be read or sung aloud — a species of image-filled music. As usual, this collection will surprise even Kelly's most assiduous readers.

"Kelly, long a poetic innovator, continues to prove himself equally prolific and adept at "fictions." Incorporating neither character nor plot, these 24 cerebral pieces meditate on the lofty and the mundane. From the opening story, "Rimbaud Back from Abyssinia," Kelly makes it clear to whom he speaks: an informed, literary reader who is familiar not only with Rimbaud's poetry but with his life. Many pieces show Kelly involved in a struggle to take the courtly concepts he's handled so well in his poetry and merge them with a thoroughly modern sensuality that incorporates schlock culture, the mystical, and the primitive. "They call death the King of Terrors, and I'm telling you who his queen is. Sex is the Queen," he says in the work which gives the volume its title. Time and again, the writer/philosopher seeks to bond with nature: The adult crosses the wind's fence, last barrier between himself and the sea; the child leans out a window, desperate to learn how birds fly. Sex elicits nature metaphors as well; in "Red Crow" the narrator's tongue massages a loved one "like a little wet animal looking for a nest." Kelly's erudite playfulness is easiest to see in "The Red King," simply because this novella- length work permits each element more room to vie for attention. But far more interesting (i.e., accessible) is the volume's other long piece, "In Irish America," which traces his ancestry and places Celtic symbology beside flaccid contemporary references, mercilessly contrasting the legendary warriors who thought they would soon "die, drip of our wounds . . . and go to America" with his own birth in the United States.—Kirkus Review