Downwind From the Fires of Nothingness
by Tom Kryss. Kirpin Press, P.O. Box 2943, Vancouver, Washington 98668-2943.
Book Review by Michael Basinski
Poems of sparrows and rainy urban streets with scraps of paper stuck to the pavement of the imagination, so Kryss moves about in poetry as a alchemist, “…with a knowledge that guides… the artisans transform common materials/ into small objects of wonder.” He reaches out in these tight lines, with these crafted lines like a baseball player from one of his poems, to catch, to reach for IT! IT the space between the real that is then the poem and the poetry comes up through the fissures in humanity from everywhere and we are all angels and sparrows. The IT of poetry is everywhere in the poems of Tom Kryss. He finds IT in the face of Jane Goodall, in an old black man in a wheelchair, in midgets, in a children’s librarian. What I like in the poems of T. Kryss is that they opened in me the notion that poetry does not just belong to small circle of masturbating precious poodles but is in fact all places at all times and one needs only to engage IT. There IT is. Here IT is. Here is a book of poems by Tom Kryss, a ring of keys.
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