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What happens at the very moment when thought moves from the banal and everyday into the oblique and odd? In "drift, " Kevin Connolly investigates this mysterious mental realm that all of us tend to find ourselves in from time to time. Examining the moment when one thought collides into another, Connolly incorporates into his poems such witty, joyous ideas as a meditation on the business end of a sea cucumber and a world in which disfigured historical celebrities are left to wander the consumer grid. Constantly juxtaposing opposites to delightful effect, "drift" meanders into, in Connolley's own words, a place where "what starts the heart stops the world."
About the author
Kevin Connolly is a poet, journalist, and editor. He lives in Toronto's east end with his partner, writer Gil Adamson.
Summary
What are we thinking at any given moment? What happens to a thought as that moment, on its way to oblivion, collides with its successor?
Rambunctious, witty, joyous, and bittersweet, drift is an investigation conducted by a truly unfettered imagination. In fluid, sparkling cadences, Kevin Connolly's poems let the mind's downtime have the stage for a change -- the desert sky transformed; Spring Break as viewed by passing skipjacks; narratives of danger and dream narrative; a meditation on the business end of a sea cucumber; figures of history disfigured and left to wander the consumer grid -- such are the entirely odd, entirely current events in Connolly's world, a realm that stands at an acute angle from the place we normally live in but which we all seem to drift into. As one of Connolly's own high-voltage sonnets states, "what stops the heart starts the world."
In drift's constant juxtaposition of abundance and loneliness, we hear what it is to confront a new century, having quite likely failed during the last. We're reminded, by a voice unlike any other on the Canadian landscape, that our solitude is painful yet precious.
