terrylkennedy.com

"The phrase that kept coming to mind as I read Terry Kennedy’s new heartfelt book-length elegy was ‘If memory serves….’ Memory serves so well in memorializing a lost loved-one in this tender book of grief and remembrance, a tribute to a life now kept alive in the beautiful images of how that life was lived. "

"What the Light Leaves Hidden by Terry Kennedy is an enchanting fairy tale of an elegy, complicated and tender, and probing in its exploration of loss, the only constant of our human condition, always in tension with a world that demands the living move on, even when not ready. Lightning bugs and bees, blossoms of hydrangea and lilies, rabbits and hawks at the river’s edge come and go throughout Kennedy’s memory landscape. I can’t remember another book of poetry that manages to be as honest about the seductive nature of grief while also providing a balm that soothes the ache of grieving."

"What the Light Leaves Hidden is a tribute to the power of memory to alleviate pain for the loss of a loved one. In a modern pastoral elegy, the speaker meditates on the difficulty of finding adequate expression of grief, the limits of language for mourning, even as the poems achieve that goal, discovering in the natural world a process of renewal while facing mortality. This work is both lament and celebration of the rare gift of love."

"Terry Kennedy has written a moving addition to the literature of grief. What the Light Leaves Hidden is a courageous sequence of lyrics with their edges stripped away, poems that bleed from one precisely wrought image of loss into the next, forming a graceful arc of lament. How to reconcile mortality with the persistence of so much natural beauty? Kennedy grounds his argument in an inland American landscape as articulate as Whitman’s coastal world in ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.’ The poems of What the Light Leaves Hidden are relentless in their cauterizing heat."

"A poet goes out alone for a walk and what happens? Well, of course, he’s not alone—or he’s alone with his memories, his feelings; alone with a dear one who’s gone, but lives on in his heart. In Terry Kennedy’s book-length poem, What the Light Leaves Hidden, this walking becomes a moving meditation on loss—both the personal loss of that loved one and the perpetual losses inherent in the natural world: changing seasons, the way the light dies at the end of each day. Tender yet clear-eyed, this poet knows such losses are inevitable—they make life precious, make love a rare and fleeting gift. Out of that knowledge, this poem, rich with sensory detail, reminds us how ‘in the end, we can / do nothing but stand astonished’ by those we love and have lost, warmed by what we carry inside us always, memory like ‘a bright star, shining on, / even when I cannot see you."

"In What the Light Leaves Hidden, an extraordinary book-length elegiac poem, Terry Kennedy explores memory as not mere recapitulation but as living experience perhaps more intense than the foundational experiences themselves. Kennedy’s elegy is unabashedly tender with prophetic musings on love and grief inextricably intertwined, which seems just as natural and without pretense as Kennedy’s recurring observations of North Carolina’s mountain laurel and oak leaf hydrangea, the hawk and rabbit, even the invasive and ubiquitous mimosa, and the river that ‘is just a river; / doing a river’s work, singing a river’s song.’ Kennedy is one of the few poets of his generation who humbly pulls off Whitmanesque contradictions that spawn insight and discovery like ‘You are the light. You are / what the light leaves hidden,’ instead of discovery steeped in coy didacticism and self-satisfaction that I see too often in poems."

"In What the Light Leaves Hidden Terry Kennedy writes through the ache of time all the way to the open wound of loss. The long elegy which like the self is made of individual glimpses of life, twines together memory and place with the gift of observation and offers up care and dignity to the dead. Here, the farrago of life is not only mourned but loved, is brought back to us whole and ordered. The poems reflect on nature as a mirror to the memory of life: the stars and the fireflies, the days ‘collecting the smooth black stones’ from a river, and in these moments where pain rises to the surface, where it is ‘re-lived’ there is also hope. As if our collective grief is addressed, Kennedy writes, ‘To notice this, to fall inside it, is not / an invitation to despair—some things / we cannot change.’ Like Jack Gilbert or Marie Howe, Kennedy has written an astounding tribute to life, one that offers solace in brokenness and shows us, through language, a way to endure."