Devotional Forensics by Joseph Kidney

                                                                                               If I said 
                           my mind was a wilderness of ropes, would you
                           recognize the way your own thoughts either 
                           come together in knots, or, coming apart, unravel? 
                           The spark that loosens the power from gasoline. 
                           The smoke that is the tangling of that power. (16)

You happen on these lines early in the collection, about two thirds through a poem mind-bendingly titled “From the Cockpit of the Müllverbrennungsanlage Spittelau.” The title refers to a waste incineration plant in Vienna which is considered to be “ein Kunstwerk,” an architectural “work of art,” according to Wien Energie’s website. Like the plant of its namesake, the poem burns a lot of metaphorical “waste.” It rises in a long column of verse densely, perfectly enjambed, spinning fast with ideas, anecdotes, philosophical musings, all knotting and unravelling in the fire of the poem’s logic. The lines I quote are an appeal to like infernos in the reader’s mind as well as a key to the enigma of this particular poem. I take them to be an intimation of the collection’s broader aesthetic ambitions: to convert the dross and data of contemporary experience into a new, sustainable form of artistic energy.

This pillar of a poem represents one of the predominant modes Joseph Kidney uses in this spectacular debut collection. Among these “column poems”—I have no better word for them—we can count “A Net I Seek to Hold the Wind,” “Deificari in Otio,” and the (erstwhile named) Young Buck Poetry prize-winning poem “Garbage Takeout,” among several others. Beyond this mode, a hallmark of Kidney’s already distinguished early career, Devotional Forensics shows exceptional range. It showcases a variety of shorter lyric, nature poetry, ekphrastic pieces and occasional poems of various kinds. All of these remain encyclopedic and intellectual without sacrificing an ounce of sensuousness, wit and humour.

Commentators before me have already noted the names of Anne Carson, John Ashbery and Shakespeare as key influences. Out of their example, I take it, Kidney sources the truly dizzying array of his figurative language. In one entry, for instance, he describes the act of shucking oysters as “interspecies arm wrestling.” In another, he evokes the “orange snore/ of the electric fireplace” in a moment of synaesthetic insight. In the sound of windshield wipers, he hears the words “distinguish. distinguish. distinguish.” His speaker also brilliantly tells of the difficulties of existence in “the year of Zoom hermetics,” describing himself as moving “with skeletal precarity,/ like an atrophied Jenga tower, like tempered glass/ a glance away from shattering.” The vulnerability of that speaker’s statement is equal to the author’s confidence in expressing it. It is extremely rich, nestling two similes beside an already highly charged and original metaphor, hinging in yet another descriptor through the use of carefully calculated alliteration. Joseph Kidney is one of those rare poets who really thinks the world through poetry. He has not one commonplace idea. Every one of his verses shines with a radiance you can’t tell whether divine or demonic.

Learnedness is also part of this collection’s magic. The presence of the Roman poet Virgil frequently surfaces, a figure Kidney reads very attentively. I spoke earlier of Kidney’s mastery of enjambment. His English is indeed almost as often and effectively enjambed as Virgil’s Latin. In a poem called “Familiar Clothing,” he reimagines Aeneid 6.214-35, recounting the burial of Aeneas’ companion Misenus. This entry shows refreshing familiarity with the original and a willingness to luxuriate in the details of Virgil’s vocabulary. Virgil describes Misenus’ huge pyre as built “rich [thickly piled] with pine and split oak” (pinguem taedis et robore secto/ ingentem struxere pyram 6.214-5). In Kidney it is “rich with pine and chalk-dry oak.” By transforming the “split oak” (robore secto) into “chalk-dry oak,” doubtless deriving his “dry” from the similarity between siccus (dry) and sectus (split or cut), Kidney effectively splits the Latin open, cranks up the sensorium of his English translation to communicate some of the untranslatable richness of the original. Kidney also speaks of Misenus’ body as a “synecdoche of limbs.” His rendering here plays on the fact that the original chillingly uses the lone word membra or “the limbs” as a synecdoche for Misenus’ inert body laid to rest (membra toro defleta reponunt 6.220). Everywhere in this entry, Kidney shows a profound understanding of the tragic spirit of the Aeneid. He choses a passage that Virgil alone could manage, whose depth of pathos seriously outweighs its short duration. It is telling of Kidney’s own poetic skill that he chooses one of these moments rather than any of the putatively “bigger” ones directly following, which take place in Virgil’s Hell. Instead of venturing in the same place as Dante or in the same way as Heaney, he translates only that liminal moment: not the Descent, but the moment before.

Finally, it would be impossible to end this review without speaking to Joseph Kidney’s humour. Pun after distinguished pun graces this collection’s pages, in titles and in-text. Jokes are everywhere. Absurdity abounds. Intrusive thoughts become reality. The collection’s wit is total and Nabokovian. Titles like “When I Talk to Myself I Name-Drop the Furniture” or “Quasi Fan Tutte” come to mind. The character of “Nephron”—a Greek pun on the author’s last name, a character comparable to T.S. Eliot’s “Sweeney”—recurs in a number of poems in section V of the collection. Those Nephron entries are pure fun and some of the most pleasantly inventive parts of the book. I also can’t help but note one poem called “The Salt Lamp,” previously published in CV2, which tells of a speaker so curious about the mineral composition of the object that he ends up licking it. There is of course much to savour in that poem beyond its humour, but the fact that it, like many others in the collection, has the casual, anecdotal élan of a joke, makes for a lot of its excellence. Devotional Forensics presents us with something truly remarkable: the first, full flowering of a truly original poetic talent. Nothing and no-one sounds like Joseph Kidney. Everything about his poetry has that priceless weirdness that is the mark of an art whose originality is won at great effort, with deep reflection. He writes poetry both of the highest ambition and of the greatest vitality, and his voice will resonate in the world of Canadian letters over the course of many decades to come.

Sources Consulted:

Müllverbrennungsanlage Spittelau » Alle Infos | Wien Energie

Virgil. P. Vergilii Maronis Opera. Ed. R.A.B. Mynors. Oxford Classical Editions, 1969. Print.

James Dunnigan

James Dunnigan is a writer from Montreal, author of four poetry chapbooks, including most recently "Windchime Concerto" (Alfred Gustav Press 2022). His work has appeared in Maisonneuve Magazine, HA&L, CV2, Event and The Imagist. He edits for Cactus Press (Montreal) and Black Sails Publications (Toronto). A fifth chapbook, "I Spurrina" is forthcoming in June. He is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Toronto, and a proud TA to brilliant students.

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