Borrowed Light
I’m just starting Ken Haas’ first book of poetry Borrowed Light (Red Mountain Press, Seattle, 2020). The book turned up in a box as I was life-cleaning my archives. Praise my cluttered home with its stacks of books & paraphernalia. Knowledge balanced precariously on leaning towers and golden gates. Haas himself living in my hometown, San Francisco, running a writing program at UCSF Children’s Hospital.
The first poem Birdsong pulled me in. “...songs, only a few / of kettle and clock, / cloistered heart and challenged soul.”
The second poem Sleeping in the Crack knocked my socks off. Going along with a powerful story, nice cadences, him a Jew boy locked in the closet in first grade for tangling with Mrs. Karasick over “French Impressionism,” on to moving through trauma relief with his parents “dangerous in different ways,” into where he found his own power “...Simo’s pizza, / a Moose Skowron glove, / Janie Siegel next door...).
But, it was the third poem in, that sealed the deal OLQM (first published in The Schuylkill Valley Journal). Making us wait to the poem’s very end to reveal what the mysterious acronym really means, giving us early on the “lapsed Catholic” clue as to what glossary might apply. What gets me jazzed is watching a smart obtuse clue descrip of Ken’s “public school spuds” mixing it up with the parochial school kids ... [The acronym] an orange code stitched / in the lime-green ties of the schoolboys on Arden Street.”
Only to turn into a litany of praises of the world as it was, as it is, and for two local boys killed in ‘Nam, sacrificed to Our Lady, Queen of Martyrs.
I’m excited to get a bit further along.
