Galley of the Beloved in Torment

by Kyle McCord, J.P. Dancing Bear (Editor)

Kyle McCord's Galley of the Beloved in Torment bears the standard of les poètes maudits, the accursed poets, of Rimbaud, Corbière, Mallarmé, et al., and of their forefather Baudelaire. Like the speaker in many of McCord's poems, these fi n-de-siècle poets thrive in the outskirts, fi ngering the hem of society, free to witness her unraveling. Although McCord wrote Galley of the Beloved in Torment some 125 years aft er this time, his book parades the same Decadent style, a style indicative of high sentence, sensuality, social deviance, and the bizarre, to name a few, but enough to stoke our, as Marlow said in Heart of Darkness, "fascination of the abomination." -Ezekiel Black Kyle McCord is a wickedly lavish poet. His scope is broad, his syllables exactingly chosen. The Galley of the Beloved in Torment brings us the pleasure of fable, the "hot breath of one rock on another," the spectacle of life transformed. -Noy Holland Kyle McCord delicately folds promises, prophecies, laments, lists and directives into poems that exhibit both high mastery and intense earnestness. Lines shift and vary in unpredictable ways, as do the poems' speakers, who observe, summon, question, caution, and - above all else - morph. The line between man's best and beast repeatedly blurs. The personal terrifyingly melts into the global in an intimate overlay. Galley of the Beloved in Torment is not love poetry, nor political poetry, nor philosophical poetry; it is all those at once, slippery and sly yet hardhitt ing in a fantastic(al) blend. -YZ Chin

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2010

Reviews

[Joe]

Some blistering images. At times, when the lines shorten up reads as Michael Ondaatje's early poetry--primal places, states of violence. When things open up, become more associative reminded of A. Kozma's first book with brooding images and anachronistic seeming phrasing saturating a more contemporary environment--"in your whirlpool of unemployment: / Into the ballroom of the west you came waltzing / and into the strip mine of death." Appreciated those poems that just let themselves go bonkers. To read: "You'll Never Leave this Jungle Alive." "The Celestial Fish Pared by Stars," "Everything is Gathering."

[Sandra]

McCord writes in dense, rich imagery that in this volume has the flavor of Father, one distant and unknowable, approachable in degrees. Many times I experience this work as opaque but the language holds my interest and then a light breaks through as if rapidly moving clouds let the sun come through a moment. It is an exciting moment. I love "The Beastman Poems"; do we really think we are so far from the laws of the forest? But my favorite phrase, a brilliant one, in "It Was a Rat that Carried Your Heart to the Sea," sums up the ambiguity and rock solid fact of our fate: "To be born an incalculable number." So true.

[Colorado Review]

Reviewed for Colorado Review by Kristina Marie Darling