At the End of Time: The Incomplete Works of Richard Krech, Volume II
By Richard Krech

Reviewed by Eric Weinstein

sunnyoutside press, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-934513-27-9
perfect bound, 194 pp., $20.00

Richard Krech’s poetic sensibility occupies an interstitial space between the hybrid lyric characteristic of contemporary American poetry and that of the twentieth-century poets cataloged in Donald Allen’s New American Poetry 1945 – 1960. Not really a Beat, not quite of the Black Mountain tradition, and too young to be a first-generation New York School poet, Krech is nonetheless profoundly influenced by these poetic movements and integrates their innovations into his newest poems, which span the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Whether his poems are exploring the politics of “the oil industry, / the devolution of the republic / into a theocracy, / and the chilling effect on liberty / mis-named the Patriot Act” (“New Bangladesh, Louisiana”) or embodying the technological and linguistic evolutions of the new century via “the vibrate mode of a cell phone. / Subtle insinuation / of yr world / beyond the presently manifested / circumstances” (“Some Global Positioning System Dharma”), Krech constantly employs his poetry as both a means designed to expose the underlying components of the social and electronic systems we construct and as an artistic end in its own right. “We live in the real / real world,” he writes, and this necessitates the reading and writing of poems.

The selected—or, in this case, “incomplete”—poems of many poets are often little more than “best ofs,” or in the words of Kay Ryan, “bestiaries.” Not so At the End of Time: Krech’s second volume of selected poems reads like a much smaller collection, carrying the reader along a narrative arc spanning the poet’s inevitable return to his craft (“yet the river flows from the mountains / forever,” “The Location of the Triple Jewel”) to his coming to terms with the effacing flow of that craft, that river (“and they? / They may never even know / that you / used to exist,” from the title poem). By turns joyful, nostalgic, and meditative, Krech’s At the End of Time is a truly enjoyable and thought-provoking read.

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Eric Weinstein is the winner of the 2010 New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM chapbook contest for his collection, Vivisection. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2009, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Massachusetts Review, and Prairie Schooner. He is an MFA candidate at New York University.

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