Resurrection of the Dust by John McKernan Reviewed by Christopher Vera ISBN: 0978578252
McKernan has a wonderful knack for seeing things in ways the reader might not have thought of, or better still, of things to which perhaps we had never given a passing thought. For example, in “Center of the Earth,”
There are several poems with titles that could be poems in and of themselves, including “After the Evening Temperatures the Jovial Radio Weatherman in Huntington West Virginia, Says that a Night of Freezing Rain has Warped a Hundred Tinker Toy Sets in the Suburbs of Dubuque Iowa” or “The Botany Professor Confronts the Wreckage of his Life & Writes a Letter to the Oral Roberts University Poetry Club Declining an Invitation to Read Several Thousand of His Ten Million Heroic Couplets.” True to the title of the book, McKernan includes several poems about death and corpses, and the overall sense a reader might get is one of grieving and contemplation after the death of his father. All the while McKernan deals us his morbid sense of wit and wry use of language, as he does in “Death’s Rummage Sale Way Down the Block.”
But he can be quite serious on the subject, as he demonstrates in “Four Days,” a shadowy poem in which McKernan recalls images of his father.
Other poems, such as “My Last Breath,” “Ode to My Death,” and “A Phalanx of Mirrors…” continue this artful reflection as the reader witnesses McKernan experiencing, through his father’s death, the last lesson a parent can ever teach their child. In a collection this large, there are bound to be works that do not please the eye or ear as they should. In “ Omaha Nebraska,” the poet declares
and in “Planting Red Maple Saplings,” we learn of
which beg for more editing and maturation. But overall, I believe most readers will find McKernan’s expansive imagination an entertaining and thought-provoking place to visit if they are willing to hold his hand and let him guide them through some of its very darkest corners.
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Prick of the Spindle Poetry Editor Christopher Vera is fascinated by the foundations of our universe: the natural, unnatural, the supernatural, the fantastic. He explores these elements in his poetry and looks for it in the writing of others. His work has appeared in Ship of Fools, Apex and Abyss, Heliotrope, Mobius, the Magee Park Poet’s Anthology and others. He is earning an MFA in Creative Writing through National University in San Diego, California. He can always be found at www.mysticnebula.com.
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