Claudia Keelan

“Charged with negative capability, Keelan’s avant-garde collection plays in multiple dimensions….Like a linguistic ethicist—like a mad, social-science hybrid with a knack for transcending—Keelan wonders what worldly results might be achieved by a re-framing, on the level of the pronoun, of our grammatical relationship to the world. Given our sense, given evidence of life on many levels, can we second-and-third-person ourselves? Can we out ourselves toward awareness beyond our singular frames? What kind of relationships are possible when borders are permeable?…Keelan’s de-centered voices proliferate through leaps of metaphor and association, in choral compositions eulogizing the national soul.” —Denver Quarterly “. . .a genuine and not-at-all trite sense of gratitude for the miracles of daily life provides responses, if not answers, to Keelan’s questions, but many post-elections readers will find her inquiries into the larger patterns and parameters of the national soul more pressing.” —Publishers Weekly “. . .notions of plastic language, wit, humor, religious and philosophical considerations underlie all the work in this book. Keelan isn’t scared to make pictures or be simple—there are plenty of striking, careful images here; love poems, too—but neither is she afraid to grapple with ideas and explore the notions of writing and interior life. These poems may be rooted in experience, experiences which ring true, but they are used as stepping stones to something else: that something being poetry rather than stories told in broken lines.” —Stride Magazine “Claudia Keelan’s The Devotion Field fully confirms the promise of her earlier books, especially the recent Utopic. The quotidian world of what seems to be things, “dog food and soil,” “dust and bits of paper,” flows naturally and luminously into the world of ideas, which becomes even more palpable. ‘Into the possibilities of the next page,/ Or more nearly, another day.’ The transit, returning us to where we always are, is breathtaking.” —John Ashbery

“Keelan’s poetic, as capacious as it is exacting, defies easy categorization: her epistemological, ethical, and spiritual acuity permeates poems that are as attentive to the physical world as they are to the paradoxes of our failures to represent it. . . . The exhilarating surprise in these poems is the ardor with which she savors the sonorous and sensual within the very language of our failures, the zeal with which she teaches us to glean.” —Rain Taxi “Each world is a room, each room is a world, and Keelan’s poetry—through syntax, typography, verb tense, and images—brings us toward the realization that our being in the world is our realizing the world in every being . . . Keelan’s book accomplishes a glorious synthesis of spiritual, political, and philosophical traditions that emphasize unity, openness, and love with a poetic tradition that has frequently been thought of as exclusionary and difficult.” —Boston Review “This profoundly moving book is fact of a consummate skill and the human possibilities it works to realize and to honor. In these poems Claudia Keelan keeps the faith for us all.” —Robert Creeley “These are beautiful, anguished political poems. They emerge from a Southern past, and a Western desert present in whose palpable solitude Keelan writes for both herself and the many. Her language, as language, is intended to create change through a deliberate evenhanded musicality; but the poems are also desert-air-clear as to meaning. Utopic is an unanticipated accomplishment.” —Alice Notley

If God is not available, then what is? In this collection of "coming of age" poems, Claudia Keelan attempts to answer that question by testing the limits of influence on one writer's notions of self and God. Those influences, or teachers, are as varied as literature, family, and organized religion. Through many voices, The Secularist shapes new poetic forms through which God may be glimpsed.

Keelan's collection examines the nature of grief through poetry, gathering together a sequence of elegies and poems on loss. The opening group of what Keelan (The Devotion Field) calls "Little Elegies" mourns various losses, including a girl who died at 14 ("Imagine, she's finally a sexy teenager") and famous poets Keelan had known, including Robert Creeley and Kenneth Koch ("I heard the echo of your line resound / Through the hearts of thousands"), as well as the Virgin Mary and the victims of 9/11. Keelan's jerky, fragmentary poems also examine the violence of other contemporary phenomena, such as the video game Grand Theft Auto ("He wins the game! / Choosing each time to crash / & not to kill"). Elsewhere, she looks at how language itself points to absence: "I believed the linguist / On the radio who said words are most interesting / When they indicate something not there, / Something not inherently in or of themselves." The striking long poem "Everybody's Autobiography" recalls Keelan's own and others' pasts. Keelan, one of our best, if too little known, experimental poets, does what she can in this sixth collection to steady "the human boat" which "Came capsizing ... / Came lost."