First, a note: I'm trying to kick myself into doing some substantial writing again, and found myself going through the review pages and found a number of reviews that were originally published at Epinions and are no longer available there. I may re-use some of them at other sites, but they will have to be re-worked first (different audiences need different approaches). So I thought I'd revive the Sunday reviews department here and republish some of them, which may help me start writing original pieces. This is the first, originally published in 2003. If you have a reaction, leave a comment.
I first read The Healing Notebooks several years ago, when the second wave of friends was dying around me. Like so many of the literary works produced by gay men in this period, these poems are about loss, but they are much more than that.
What keeps me coming back to these poems, what has kept me coming back to them for ten years, is their incredible simplicity, which opens to amazing depth and strength. My long-time favorite of these twenty brief works, a sketch made at the dinner table, starts “Not the way they hold me,/but the way they hold/the cup . . .” In fourteen short lines Fries paints a picture of love that may have been matched, but never exceeded, and he does it through a spare, distilled observation of the commonplace, ending “of all hands/your hands/of all men/you.”
And perhaps I’ve already said too much. These are fragile-seeming works, small, quiet poems that keep resonating long after you have put the book back on the shelf, slight songs that do not really speak to intellect. (How much magic is there in a spectral analysis of sunrise?) There is something almost Japanese about them in their serenity, their fine distillation of the mundane into a potent, numinous draught that takes us far from the everyday events that they describe. There is a particular vision in this collection, perhaps born of the necessity of making every second matter, measured against the reality of time that suddenly has a limit: “Watch the moment./It is nothing complacent.”
What makes us human? Scientists, theologians, everyone has tried to answer this question, and the answers come up lacking. Kenny Fries provides an answer that I don’t think will have to be revised: We make our art as our common humanity, a memory that is much more than history. Our paintings, our dances, our music, our poetry are all guardians of the moments from our lives that have meaning far beyond the mere events. “. . . It is the leaf I am/holding, the orange burning/the heat of summer into my hand./How else can I remember this orange/in the winter gray?” Poetry like that of Kenny Fries, in its elegance and simplicity, peels away the layers of irrelevance and makes our souls tangible.
What keeps me coming back to these poems, what has kept me coming back to them for ten years, is their incredible simplicity, which opens to amazing depth and strength. My long-time favorite of these twenty brief works, a sketch made at the dinner table, starts “Not the way they hold me,/but the way they hold/the cup . . .” In fourteen short lines Fries paints a picture of love that may have been matched, but never exceeded, and he does it through a spare, distilled observation of the commonplace, ending “of all hands/your hands/of all men/you.”
And perhaps I’ve already said too much. These are fragile-seeming works, small, quiet poems that keep resonating long after you have put the book back on the shelf, slight songs that do not really speak to intellect. (How much magic is there in a spectral analysis of sunrise?) There is something almost Japanese about them in their serenity, their fine distillation of the mundane into a potent, numinous draught that takes us far from the everyday events that they describe. There is a particular vision in this collection, perhaps born of the necessity of making every second matter, measured against the reality of time that suddenly has a limit: “Watch the moment./It is nothing complacent.”
What makes us human? Scientists, theologians, everyone has tried to answer this question, and the answers come up lacking. Kenny Fries provides an answer that I don’t think will have to be revised: We make our art as our common humanity, a memory that is much more than history. Our paintings, our dances, our music, our poetry are all guardians of the moments from our lives that have meaning far beyond the mere events. “. . . It is the leaf I am/holding, the orange burning/the heat of summer into my hand./How else can I remember this orange/in the winter gray?” Poetry like that of Kenny Fries, in its elegance and simplicity, peels away the layers of irrelevance and makes our souls tangible.
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