the correct fury of your why is a mountain
Kevin Andrew Heslop
Gordon Hill Press, 2021
Review by Robert Colman
The intriguing aspect of reading a poet’s debut is witnessing a voice perhaps not yet fully formed but exploring themes and poetic practices that will be honed in future work. This is certainly the case in Kevin Andrew Heslop’s debut, the correct fury of your why is a mountain. In his particular case, the poetic voice is already distinctive, but Heslop’s method of expressing it ranges from lyric precision to experimental fragmentation.
The lyric is where Heslop shines brightest. Few of these poems are linear, but mood and sense build from the controlled dissonance. This makes it difficult to capture the “sense” of Heslop’s best poems by quoting a few lines, but the first six lines of the poem “for Kate” come close:
Listen: someone’s saying a prayer in a locked bathroom.
Someone’s locked tongue jangles in prayer. Peculiar
this attempt to offer syllables as if to speak of her.
This mumbling under thunder. This candle lit
for that spectacle which ends not with a curtain falling,
but a thunderbolt from a cloudless sky.
The rhymes of “someone” and “tongue,” and “mumbling under thunder” roll the lines forward while the “candle,” “spectacle,” and “curtain” foreshadow the thunderbolt in the last line. It’s a passage that is satisfying to read out loud as well. The locked tongue and the locked bathroom are curious companions, the idea of a person trapped physically and emotionally expressed powerfully—the locked tongue jangling, trying to free itself.
Heslop’s more experimental poems are equally effective. The first section of the book, for instance, is a selection of poems that use blank space to accentuate mental fragmentation/frustration:
as light issues perspective on collapse
together i’m thinking nu
-clear armageddon sounds the prettiest the most tangential
now
(“the prettiest the most tangential now”)
The way these lines fragment, it’s natural for the eye to read them in different ways each time—so that sense fragments and recombines, like the mind running through several ideas at once in a panic, which seems a natural reaction to pandemic, war, climate crisis, etc.
At times the collection reaches for both the maximal and minimal. There are several prose poems that stretch over two pages, each of which reads as a monologue—indeed, each is in quotations, as if we’ve arrived at a campfire as the speaker is about to get beerily loquacious. Contrastingly, Heslop includes a suite of nine minimalist poems and aphorisms that are each between one and six short lines. Perhaps if they had been dispersed among his lyric poems, each could have served as a resting moment in the overall work to pause and reflect.
This doesn’t detract from Heslop’s accomplishment, though. His writing is compelling. I look forward to seeing Heslop take his skills further—this is certainly a promising debut.
Robert Colman graduated with his MFA from UBC in 2016. His most recent book of poems is Democratically Applied Machine (Palimpsest Press 2020).