Kudos for Victoria Kelly [by David Lehman]

Victoria Kelly has an impressive educational itinerary. She studied at Harvard, Iowa, Dublin. Her poems and stories have begun to appear in the best places. But what is unique about her is that, in addition to the subject matter that everyone has by virtue of being alive, she writes from a rare vantage point. Her husband is a US Navy fighter pilot who has been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and this and related circumstances allow her to address all manner of things usually ignored in contemporary poetry.

Ms.Kelly has a flair for similes so good that they can enact a poem's closure, as when she brings to a close "Standing On the Airfield, Before War." She is speaking of a durable love that is "not dazzling / or eager or brave / like an old man before a party, / fixated on a tie, and his wife waiting / patiently in the kitchen, letting him decide." There is an entire domestic drama here unfolding in the minutiae of language -- an adverb ("patiently"), two participles ("waiting," "letting him"), and a pair of governing adjectives ("old," "fixated"). 

Ms. Kelly shows that ingenuity and deep feeling are not incompatible. In "Quantum Theory," for example, the focus is on a ribbon, "said to have been touched by a saint," that the speaker's mother received back when "masses were still said in Latin." Fifty years have gone by, and to counteract a sense of change and loss, the poet offers a vision based on a scientific premise -- that time is elastic, that "there are moments that go on forever," and that therefore "somewhere out there, / my mother is still being given that ribbon."   

Perhaps best of all is Ms. Kelly's ability to speak to and sometimes for a community to whom attention must be paid. Take the title poem. What happens "When the Men Go Off to War"? The change, the emotional upheaval, the knowledge that some of the men won't come home again, invites a retreat into fantasy: "the base has disappeared" and the wives "set up for a few weeks at a time / in places like Estonia or Laos -- / places where they still have legends, / where a town of women appearing in the middle of the night / is surprising but not unheard of." The poem concludes as happily as such a poem can, with "our matte of red lipstick, the babies blanketed inside strollers," though "our husbands look at us a little sadly, / the way people do when they know / they have changed but don't wait to say it."

When the Men Go Off to War is a superb introduction to a poet we'll be hearing a lot from as time goes by.

-- David Lehman

Comments

[Grace Cavalieri]

I am deeply touched by Victoria Kelly, not only because I am a Naval Aviator's widow-wife, but as a reader