Review: S. Preston Duncan's three poems

by Lindsay Hargrave.


Duncan’s verse marches through these beige pages with the solemnity of spoken incantation and chant.
 
This is especially true of his first piece, titled “Love[sic],” which beats away at metaphor like a drum. Wrought with the pain of absent love, the repetition of grief, of the very word itself, is heavy with ceremony and power each time it is repeated. For instance, the below verse cuts to the core of the speaker’s grief from every imaginable angle:
 
“In overgrown fields ascending
I grieve you

In an arrow of migrant plume
I grieve you
In the ginger and jasmine of rest
I grieve you

At an altar of unnamed saints

I grieve you”
 
The remaining pieces, “You Don’t Need to Know Much About Dogs to Tell She’s Thoroughbred” and “We Have Bathed in Nails and Been Restored,” enjoy similar themes that engage with ritual, religion and the natural world. Their language maintains a mesmerizing tone that invokes the authority of a cleric as they weave through enticing and challenging imagery, again inviting the reader into the realm of the supernatural.
 
Each time I reread these three poems, they re-enchant me and imbue me longing for the intensity of ceremonial fire. Set yourself ablaze.

read duncan's poems in issue 1