Poetry

Song

Brigit Pegeen Kelly writes a lyrical, surreal poetry that flies toward the magical. Informed by a spiritual vision, her poems sweep us into new relationships, as the darkness that “doesn’t come down, but rises up. . . . It gets the ankles first. It circles / The ankles like flood water gradually filling/The basement of a house. Dark water full/ Of unnameable things.”

“Percival”

Percival comes. If I pretend he is not here
He grows larger in the barn, filling all the shadows,
And then I cannot go in to feed the cows

And I hear those who give milk crying for milk
And I see their hearts, like children’s palms,
Opening and closing in the garden. Even in winter

I keep the garden. And Percival, who never looks
At flowers, taps his fingers on the water
That has frozen in buckets in the barn.

I hear that tapping. Even as I heard him coming,
Last night through my sleep, through the snow,
His heavy black coat dropping like wings.

FormatPaperback

ISBN978-1-880238-13-4

$17.00

About the Author

Brigit Pegeen Kelly was born in Palo Alto, California, in 1951. Her first collection of poems, To The Place of Trumpets (1987), was selected by James Merrill for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Song (BOA Editions), which followed in 1995, was the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her third collection, The Orchard (2004), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Her many other accolades include a “Discovery”/ the Nation award, the Witter Bynner Prize from the Academy of Arts and Letters, the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Illinois Arts Council. Kelly passed away in 2016.