I was only a child in a fat man's lap,
a boy merging with cigar smoke and stories
that all began: One time in Michigan. . .
I would doze and wake to Uncle Pete's big laugh.
I thought it was all part of the night in Florida.
I had forgotten winter and I didn't even
notice the heap of wood. The quiet
became different when Pete stood up,
he sat me in a striped canvas chair
where I could watch the whole thing—
all the adults built the bonfire
until it swelled bigger than the house
with fruit crates and chairs and doors.
They piled on hay and magazines, suitcases
stuffed with clothes, someone tossed in
a uniform then a mattress and a bedstead,
even live branches with wigs of moss
and enormous pinecones the size of a boy's head,
and many boxes of letters and postcards
and finally all the men threw in their shirts,
the gasoline splashed and everyone stepped back.
Uncle Pete raised his glass of bourbon, looked at
every one of us there, flipped his cigar-
and I beheld with eyes bigger than diamonds
the fuel rear up and howl its roar of freedom,
from every cell of wood air rushed, the fire
ate itself and grew! That’s when I heard the dove—
she was burning inside a shoebox! A bad mistake,
an awful joke! But Uncle Pete told me
she was really somewhere else,
I listened to try to hear where. . . She cooed softly
on and on into the flames, calm and lovely, the fire burned
and she sang and I slept and forgot it.
Now, lying in your arms I hear this same dove
outside our window, her voice is sweet
and steady, the same voice, the same dove
singing for nothing in her pure, animal eternity.
In praise of
Kent is fearless in his intensity and exuberance, but by keeping his language and his observations precise, and by balancing “the brambles and starlight” of experience, he rarely slides into the sentimental. . . . He is a poet of motion, his tone predominantly one of joy.
Maryhelen Snyder, The Greenfield Review
These are indulgent poems, heaving, breathing, exuberant poems, poems about simple joy and tolerance for life’s paradoxes. Spirit, Hurry gives us hope for poetry, for humanness. It is a blessed book and a must read.
- Steven Brady, Western American Literature