Now Chiefly Poetical

Poetry. "Kevin DiCamillo's poems are so finely tuned that they risk calling the reader's attention too exclusively to their form and to all the fragile echoes from other writers that haunt them. This volume is, in itself, plotted as a complicated sequence, and is not merely a gathering of incidental or occasional poems. The opening lyric poems are immediately arresting; but it is in the retrospect afforded them by the 'Gradual Psalms' and the 'Stations of the Cross' that they fully...
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Poetry. "Kevin DiCamillo's poems are so finely tuned that they risk calling the reader's attention too exclusively to their form and to all the fragile echoes from other writers that haunt them. This volume is, in itself, plotted as a complicated sequence, and is not merely a gathering of incidental or occasional poems. The opening lyric poems are immediately arresting; but it is in the retrospect afforded them by the 'Gradual Psalms' and the 'Stations of the Cross' that they fully reveal themselves. The sequence is in some respects simple&8212;it starts with an account of the world and of the way it has been glimpsed in various writers; then the transience of this is absorbed into the meditative sequences that follow, although the absorption of one world into another is a painful one; then it is celebrated in the Joycean epithalamium. This is poetry of the highest order, deserving of wide recognition."--Seamus Deane

"Beautiful, passionate, and inspiring."--James Martin

"The sacred underlies so much of Kevin DiCamillo's new poetry collection, NOW CHIEFLY POETICAL: the sacred of god, the sacred of love and intimacy but perhaps most powerfully, the sacred of the ordinary. On the ordinary, from his poem 'Compline Complaint' we read, 'one week to rid the shards of that smashed jar, the floor a field of infinitesimal moon crescents, toenails.' Similarly on the topic of love and intimacy in 'The Jesse Tree': 'All your transmorphications! All of them I'd love As surely as if you came in hot from mowing the lawn To reveal two of your fingers cut by a careless move Of hand near blade... 'Impossible!' you state and leave shaking your head. You're right. But I wish you were something else instead.' Even the underlying misery we experience with those we love most is included. This is DiCamillo's gift, being inclusive of the thoughts we have had and have sadly forgotten, but are gifted now with his poetic reminders. This is why we read his mapped, strung-across-the-page poems--to come to know ourselves again, along the lines of the sacred."--Joanna Clapps