The truth derived of damage A Contrary review by Gregory Lawless 
 Winter Tenor Kevin Goodan Alice James Books 2009 Buy this book> If you think that contemporary American poetry is perhaps unnaturally fascinated with urban experience, fragmentary psychology, and theoretically inflected language, then you could use a dose of Kevin Goodan’s eerie and intricate pastoral voice. The taut, untitled poems of Winter Tenor, Goodan’s gorgeous second collection, turn west at Brooklyn and drive thousands of miles deep into the wilderness of isolated human experience. Goodan’s language is both sparklingly particular and enchantingly repetitive. Words like ewes, lambs, mares, silage, frost and blood all appear and reappear in Winter Tenor with rapturous force, helping the poet to cobble together a spiritual narrative out of winter’s riches and depletions. Goodan ultimately corrals this swirling, fugal language by honing in on moments of pointed suffering, which offer enigmatic glimpses of the border between life and death: “A disorder not chaos / but a question of division” (“The shrike that impales none”). The poems in this book are invigorated by meticulous, even primal attention to the natural world that offers ecstasies as well as heartbreak. Kevin Goodan has apparently spent ‘a long time alone,’ and his icy, solitary visions show winter’s austere grounds for regeneration. Categorically, Goodan’s poetic taxonomy is as nuanced as his work is rewarding: he is part realist, part contemporary transcendentalist, a poet deeply aware of all the chaotic connotations of ‘nature’ but also its opportunities for privileged vision. His view of nature is utterly sane and contemporary, in part because Goodan avoids the philosophical excesses of lesser nature poetries. In these poems there is no trace of either the cynicism of Naturalism or the facile jubilation of neo-romanticism, which approaches the natural world as a warehouse of epiphanies. Rejecting these models, the poems in Winter Tenor instead pursue the interrelation between experiences of suffering and the sacred in the context of rustic life and labor. But perhaps that’s too sunny an assessment of Goodan’s poetic project. Death and dying provide the final terms for visionary reckoning in these poems that scour “the truth derived of damage” (“To be blessed with utility, like two mares”). Thus, even when Goodan attempts to persuade us of his capacity for identification and metaphorical internalization: “Sparse birds of which I am one,” the reader senses an elegiac rift inherent in his tropes. The speaker is no bird, of course, but Goodan announces a kinship with the birds as momentary, fleeting phenomena: things that will disappear and, eventually, die. Goodan’s speaker feels “sparse” because he feels mortal, so it’s less the flying than the vanishing that spark his avian empathies. But Goodan is not simply the kind of empathic, benign and amply-bearded naturalist you see poking through dung piles on PBS wildlife specials. There’s much slaughter in these poems, and this gives Winter Tenor the grim authority to be so beautiful. Few people write so delicately, but faithfully, about the killing or animals, or about the killing of anything: As I hold the Cheviot lamb That will not feed against my thigh Scratch it’s neck so it lifts its head Saying random words in a soft voice Until it closes its eyes and I pass The blade across the neck quick Systolic arcs surge from the kerf Callnotes to the soil I’m not saying (“Sudden shock of field-surge after rain”) Goodan isn’t beautifying slaughter here, but unswervingly documenting its contingent splendors while processing the soul-sinking weight of culpability. The speaker must trick the lamb, console it, and also watch it as it dies. But even in the midst of such misery, the language continues to fascinate both the speaker and (I hope) the reader. What is most rewarding about Goodan’s work, finally, is his mournful take on Emersonian individualism; Goodan offers us a poetry forged from direct confrontations with both the self and the difficult world beyond our air-conditioners and plasma TVs. As such Goodan’s poems propose, if not an antidote, then perhaps a much-needed compliment to the urbanized, cliquish poetry of our moment—much of which I admire. After all, the solution to anomie and urban malaise for so many writers seems to be to dive further into it, to get lost in documenting its excesses and strains on the individual—a tactic I sometimes find fatalistic, even concessive in the face of a grinding, urban capitalist life. So where is the poetry that turns inward and solitary during moments, like ours, of historical collapse? During periods of cultural disaster? Where is the poetry that turns away from the signifiers of crippling urbanization to explore the (lack of) self? Well, it’s in this book. It’s almost winter now, in almost every sense, so you should read Winter Tenor because Goodan knows, to use Jonathan Franzen’s phrase, “how to be alone,” and this is a skill that, during crisis, is nearly synonymous with survival itself. Gregory Lawless is the author of I Thought I Was New Here. He teaches at Suffolk University in Boston. Index of Reviews...>http://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/1882295757Reviews_2010.htmlhttp://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/1882295757shapeimage_1_link_0shapeimage_1_link_1

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