PRAISE FOR WHAT THE LIGHT LEAVES HIDDEN
“What the Light Leaves Hidden is a powerful poetic litany that demonstrates what it means to be fragile and wounded inside of the immediacy to be vital and loved. Terry Kennedy’s elegy evokes invocation and benediction where tenderness permeates every page, reminding us that we are all made vulnerable by simply being alive.”
—JAKI SHELTON GREEN, North Carolina Poet Laureate and author of Conjure Blues
“Sheer pleasure to clap and roar into the world Terry Kennedy’s What the Light Leaves Hidden. The line and syntax is a deft swerve shifting from one emotional stasis to another, tumbling and twisting through an aviary of punctuation and linguistic verve and jolt. The thrill of pressure and release, the joy! It would be pure indulgent splendor, if it weren’t for the gravitational centering of the heart here, the meeting of craft and the lived. All the tools here honed and purposed for the heart’s courage and peril. Have you heard enough, Reader? Seriously, I can’t get enough of What the Light Leaves Hidden, of Kennedy’s touch and vision, the care he takes. Oh, and what did Frost say? You come too. Yes, you come too.”
—JAMES HOCH, author of Miscreants
“Loss, unbearable. Born. This is the subject of Terry Kennedy’s What the Light Leaves Hidden. The hope of being reborn in its bearing, the poem’s form. Here is a book-length keening from one of the South’s greatest living ecopoets, out from the beating, bleeding heart for his lost true love, who he cannot help but see living inside every teeming thing around him, not as symbol, but as an unrelenting, kinetic fact. We go on. And that, Kennedy seems to say in every wrenching line and stanza, is the truth that makes loss and love, in the end, indivisible, and thank God. What the Light Leaves Hidden summons A.R. Ammons, W.S. Merwin, Wang Wei. Terry Kennedy is a poet’s poet.”
—REBECCA GAYLE HOWELL, author of American Purgatory
“‘Time, like the river,” as Terry Kennedy reflects in his remarkable book-length elegy, What the Light Leaves Hidden, “wears all things down; renders them soft, unrecognizable / to our former selves.” And like the river than runs through these painfully gorgeous and profoundly moving pages, Kennedy’s reflective and fluent lines succeed in plumbing all of the plangent nuances of loss and love and grief. Elegies traditionally ride on pastoral convention, but Kennedy has done the hard, soulful, and artistic work of reinvention. Here, flowers are flowers, stones are stones, a mother raccoon and her kits in a dead oak are just what they are, like hawk and prey. Yet, for all the vividly observed tangibles what the reader feels indelibly throughout is the intangible—the presence-in-absence of the Beloved. ‘Grief marks the other side of love,’ Kennedy affirms, like the other bank of a river; and can enable us to raise our eyes to see anew the world ‘we’re so used to seeing’ but ‘do not see at all.’ So, even in the loneliness ‘of being the one left behind,’ we can lift our eyes ‘toward promise, / toward the stars, toward / all the things we cannot see.’”
—DANIEL TOBIN, author of The Mansions