Description
The poems in Robert Lee Kendrick’s first full-length collection, What Once Burst With Brilliance, explore their narrators’ paths through loss — unborn children, broken relationships, unfulfilled dreams. They seek healing through encounters with nature — watching catfish, finding boar tracks, seeing the play of light on winter leaves — and manual work — from hanging drywall, to cooking a meal, to restoring a motorcycle. The book is divided in three sections. In the first section, narrative is the dominant mode as the personas reflect on their difficulties and joys of living in their rural, small towns. The second section shifts to a more lyrical tone, as the speakers move into nature to encounter its protean indifference to their freighted lives. The third section deals with human issues intertwining with natural wonder and explores the nearly limitless potential that exists between the two. Although the personas speak from their senses of dislocation and grief, the poems are, in the end, stubbornly life-affirming, like the narrators themselves.
Praise for What Once Burst With Brilliance
What Once Burst with Brilliance, by Robert Lee Kendrick, is an apt title for a book with so much shimmer. These poems are achingly elegiac—a deep, unslaked yearn for a past not vanished, but resurrected through the time-honored autobiographical “I” of the eye-witness dutifully chained to memory, distilling his only life in a series of beautifully sonic psalm-like meditations. Kendrick’s poems are at once documentary and unforgettably imagined. Their pervasive narrative drive streams with revelatory blinding diction and ghosts that pass through walls “to slip free from gravity’s hold / & rise / as columns of smoke.” What a fine book.
—Joseph Bathanti,
NC Poet Laureate (2012-2014)
Robert Lee Kendrick’s poems balance a roistering in the language of youth and speed and aftermarket parts catalogues—the “glasspacks, blower stacks, piston rings & every oil soaked thing” and a motorcycle grown “from twisted / black bones to a chrome and red dragon”—with a supplication to the sometimes slick, sometimes sticky rummaging of sounds and sights in the backwoods and creeks and the mutterings we find to measure their natures: the “rock-roughened slurry” and the “[w]hip-chinned and dour-mouthed [who] share their grim / wisdom.” Kendrick teaches us that in these moments of restoration and reinvention, in these imaginings of what something is and can be, we find connections. We find ourselves.
—Adam Vines,
Editor, Birmingham Poetry Review
Author of The Coal Life and Out of Speech
