Kevin Connolly is a poet, editor and arts journalist. His first collection of poems, Asphalt Cigar, was published by Coach House Press in 1995 and nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award. Connolly’s second collection, Happy/and, was published by ECW Press in 2002. His most recent collection, Drift, was published by House of Anansi Press in 2005, and won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Kevin Connolly lives with his partner, the novelist Gil Adamson, in Toronto.
Judges’ Citation
It’s a courageous poetic stance, to leave yourself and your reader painted into a corner. But there’s a door behind you you won’t find until you’re pressed up against it, and in this superb collection, Connolly shoves you through that door and out into naked space.
What sort of warning is being sounded in a book where the table of contents is fictional? Perhaps that the signs are not to be trusted; that you are going to have to find your own way. Such is the promise of the work of Kevin Connolly, one of Canada’s most profoundly engaged and rewarding poets. Revolver, his fourth collection, finds him deep in the territory he has made his own: the dark place where we attempt to make sense of the noise we’ve been making and the sounds coming from others. Through a multiplicity of voices and attacks, maskings and menacings, Connolly conducts an existential research that only pretends to be jokey, only feints at absurdity. But this is not a light-hearted poetry of effects: it’s a kind of stand-up comedy done with a flame-thrower. In Revolver, Connolly works subtexts of suspicion, rejecting everything received and shaking the forms to get them to reveal what there is no language for, yet. ‘People like people who stand for things’, he writes, suggesting it’s a misplaced faith, to put your trust in anything you can define. It’s a courageous poetic stance, to leave yourself and your reader painted into a corner. But there’s a door behind you you won’t find until you’re pressed up against it, and in this superb collection, Connolly shoves you through that door and out into naked space.
Selected poems
by Kevin Connolly
Hello, lady people! Pigeons are good.
Winter is good. Stoolpigeons are good –
though they’re in league with the government,
trying to kill all spontaneity.
Hello everyone! Time to start losing.
Losing is good. Losing is what we came
here to do, and it’s going quite well,
thanks for asking.
This morning I was passed by a minivan,
“Someday” printed on the vanity plate.
I wonder what she meant? “Someday soon,
goin’ with you” or “I’m gonna get out of
here someday?” or “Someday my prince,
or a real rain’s going to come.”
Given the words in advance, it
might all be easier. Interpretation –
that’s where the problems start.
Take counterpane, for an example.
Sounds like a magician’s con,
a glass counter you’d bounce coins
off, but really it means something
comforting – a blanket to keep you warm.
Coins bounce off the counterpane
and under that blanket, where they exist
now in the mind only, and so will multiply
at my request. Nothing too greedy,
enough for coffee and a newspaper,
somewhere I can look for a job, anything
to reverse the recent downturn.
People like people who stand for things.
Like Shakespeare arrived at Ellis Island with
a trussed-up suitcase and the equivalent of
$3.50 in badly out-of-date currency.
And look where he ended up.
A real job – I’d like that.
People like people who have jobs.
People like people who stand for things.
Copyright © 2008 Kevin Connolly