Introduction: Kevin Goodan

Who will angel what remains? For what is the earth but a thing to make time visible? Sparse birds, bright barns, Kevin Goodan’s poems try to decide what is noun from verb, are a winter storm’s augery. To elm & silence, to ripe the fruit, to rot the fruit, to know death is a place and each thing lives there. Listen to Adam singing in the weeds, he writes, how will I master the green language, the arrival of something unseen. Sing nones, sing vespers, satellites shimmer in abeyance to stars. Pigeon blood drying on the shit spreader, soil recalibrates simple desire or the freezer lambs calling to the unchosen. To coax dead flies from slumber, to choose the bird, to voice the bird: is brightening, miasma. Give me thorns and I will praise, and will not live to winter, which is a language I know. That my intelligence belongs to field, puddles at the base of thistle, every platelet hungry for the earth. Kevin Goodan’s poems are some vireos working toward rapture, a kingbird in the mind. The wicked shall be known as preachers of beauty, of fields, poplar that are verbs. O verb of verbs, shape me, bless me, realizing I have become what it was I wanted to be. The fallowing, feraling. Kevin Goodan.