The Novice Mourner

By Joshua McKinney

Poetry. Winner of the Dorothy Brunsman poetry prize. "These handsomely-crafted poems are remarkable--not only for their intelligence and use of language, but for their blend of sensitivity and strength. On his journey to recover the 'lost child,' Joshua McKinney's belief in innocence never wavers. At the same time, he gives dignity to boyhood's time and place, and those who inhabit it...THE NOVICE MOURNER is an achievement in that it truly demonstrates how grief can give way to a celebration of life"--Judith Minty.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0971960763
• ISBN13: 9780971960763
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Bear Star Press
• Length: 57 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

"Almost nothing, almost all"

In Joshua McKinney's second remarkable book, "The Novice Mourner," he sifts through early memories poem by poem in order to recapture, but also reshape and reinterpret, the terror and innocence of childhood. In "Quick," McKinney's opening poem, the speaker begins by assuring us, "To tell it correctly, / one must give / all the information at once," but, of course, this speaker is interested in anything but "correctness." As the sick boy in "Quick" watches the neighborhood children frolic in the snow from a window, he observes how, "a few quick words / leap ahead of sleds." It is language that interests the speaker, both then and now, how words leap ahead and after experience: creation creating. And this is what the book is ultimately about: how memory and language invade the past, re-imagining and recreating it: "Snow sifts into the corners / of the room, / heals his cluttered papers, / fleshes the bare branches / of trees, ruined by white / blossoms and leaves." The older speaker, in retrospect, through the art of poetry, will sift through the corners of childhood, flesh it out, and, ultimately, heal what was once ruined, coming to terms with a life that goes on and out. In the later poem, "In Earnest," one of the most lyrical and haunting in the book, the speaker attempts correctness, for, perhaps, the first time, describing the end of the salmon run, refusing to look away from hard truths: "Fall's gold is gone. The American / will reek another week or two / before the circling birds stop / dropping black along the river's edge / to feed upon the rotting fish." Leaving the past behind, the speaker turns to the brutal present. Here beauty has come and gone, and we realize that nothing is permanent; what has been the purpose of all this hard work, this "thrashing in the shallows?" Why visit the past at all if it does not inform the present? But then the speaker begins to describe the other mourners of "Kings," the salmon now "bloated in watery sun," a couple's lab, a pack of boys, and the speaker who leaves his own "footprints with the rest," and suddenly he understands: "death is success; and its resolve to live / nowhere in earnest, now here in every / phase, is almost nothing, almost all." One might say the same thing of memory, or of language, which are the same thing in "The Novice Mourner," maybe the same thing for everyone, even if we cannot decide whether it is "almost all, almost nothing." From McKinney one can only hope for a third book, a book that is as profound an affirmation of the power of memory and lanaguge as this book is.

This poet doesn't look away.

Joshua McKinney crafts unflinching poetry about the gritty business of living a rich emotional life. He sees the poetry in the mundane and tragic and writes it without blinking. This is not to say that there isn't humor (albeit, sometimes dark) in his work: Check out this line from "Gun": The boy and his parents take target practice at the dump//of a weekend." Do read the title poem of the selection: "The Novice Mourner."