Karla Kelsey - Knowledge, Forms, The Aviary

This book is filled with beautiful phrases, but I'm not sure what it's point is beyond that. The images that Kelsey uses certainly strike me– "and the birds, here, unnatural, hovering, over this blood-letting", "the gun firing out orange blossom into the flock held captive, sparks or bullets becoming the progeny of birds burst into the shadow of coined knowledge", etc. However, I'm not sure what Kelsey's point is with this book except to have it be beautiful. I'm also not entirely sure it needs such a defined purpose. Flynn and Greenfield were deconstructing their tortured pasts, Bradfield was telling the story of the Artic explorers and sending a message of conservationism, Mullen was playing with words and the struggle of races, Magee was playing with Dickinson, and on and on. I can't quite pick out Kelsey's "goal" with this book. She just seems to pick up Plato/ Aristotle's idea of a mind being like an aviary and fly with it (no pun intended). She uses this idea in conjunction with the camera and the idea of seeing the same things through different lenses to explore how the mind works in various given situations.

The one thing that did bother me a little bit about Kelsey's book was the abundant use of asterisks. While it's not nearly as profuse as Minnis's ellipses, I also did not find them nearly as useful. They seemed to break up what seemed like a natural rhythm flowing through her poems. The asterisks seemed like they were there more because they were a pretty symbol, rather than being there to indicate a "filled silence" like in Minnis's book. I really liked the rhythms that Kelsey creates on her own through repetition and rhyme, and I felt like poems that had asterisks all over the place distracted from that. For example, I liked these asterisk-free poems:

Flood/Fold - Aperture 3

Halting into the mouth I thought

the image of the bird would sing but it wouldn’t

though the mouth says I am content now with domestic things

the sound of the broom on the floor body moving

the way a woman’s body has been seen moving

a simpler song and more sweet some would say when heard or read

as the birds wake and there is no reason for waking oneself

on a day like this beginning in curtain light and oranges.

and

Movements
We are the ones
who are held and hold,
for the travelers all aspire to this passage,
we among them, and only two

passing, a tolling of bells
as if in a medieval city,
crier, town spire—this
burgeoned from the personal day,

signing the contract, contracting
so tightly that I out at the edges—
the breath—the song let loose—

And so unto the electrical bells, sing,
washing over bones to heaven,
heart to earth. Not any other way
to do it, though the hand aches
from holding and
elemental of the heart: hooded.