Uncertainties (PB) (2011)

UNCERTAINTIES is a meditation on the care and quick of being alive at its defiant and elegiac full by one of the masters of the American poetic continuum. This cycle of 125 poems is composed principally in two-line stanzas, or couplets: A form seemingly slight but bending and capable of compassing large ranges, including a life. As Kelly writes: "Call and response. The breathing body of poetry from the beginning. The psalms of David, the wave of them, rise and fall of plainchant, verse and response. The constantly shifting pause between the half-lines of Old English poetry and the poems of the Edda, the half-lines of the Kalevala swayed out four-handed on the saga bench. So I thought towards the two-line stanza as experiments in duration, in complex syntactic and melodic demands. The melody of the first line necessitates the melody of the next. Shape shaping shape. Formally, the poem engages with one constraint: each line wants to be semantically intact -- ideally, any line could stand alone, be my Last Words, my epitaph..."