Fierce Lyric in Karla Kelsey’s “Blood Feather”

“Blood Feather stages scenes of both unexpected victory and chronic defeat in the three featured lives, while allowing us to imagine an alternative history for these women, had they been listened to and given latitude to exercise their rightful prerogatives in the culture at large, rather than retreating into conventional expectations of femininity.”

The first thing one looks for in a poet’s work is intelligence. That quality can take many forms. Some poets are not necessarily great thinkers and work instead by feel, summoning memorable imagery and showing a melodic ear for language. That can be enough for many, perhaps most, tastes.

Yet poets with a keen analytic mind complementing more conventionally lyric qualities exert a particular fascination. This is the case of Blood Feather. Whether celebration or lament, lyric mode has often been suffocated by limiting itself to personal introspection without a larger context of history, myth, science, and the like. Although long, complex poems such as Kelsey’s have always been in existence. The last two centuries largely have let the poetry of expansive social thought fade in favor of plumbing the inner depths of the individual human psyche, notwithstanding the Romantics’ “cosmic” cries to their secular gods. To recognize this fact is not to hearken nostalgically back to the age of Pope and Dryden, whose essay-like long poems, while often forceful, witty, and self-assured, could not infrequently come across as obvious, dry, didactic longueurs, or neat, self-satisfied enunciations of “universal truths,” as in Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Man.”

“In human works, though labour’d on with pain,

A thousand movements scarce one purpose gain;

In God’s, one single can its end produce;

Yet serves to second too some other use.”

In the twenty-first-century global diaspora that is poetry in English, no purpose is served in returning to English proverbial wisdom. Rather, one yearns for a contemporary sharp intellect whetting itself against doubt, imbued with an open spirit of quest, and tendering redemption one can believe in. Such a poetics can be found in Karla Kelsey’s ambitious and extraordinary Blood Feather, which was released with Tupelo Press.