NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

John McKernan's poetry has all the hallmarks of the American way of making poetry. Expect scattered line-breaks (using the space-key), seemingly random use of capital letters, one-word statements. No punctuation to spoil the flow. Two-line spaces between lines. Titles that can go on for five lines,eg

		THE BOTANY PROFESSOR CONFRONTS THE WRECKAGE
	OF HIS LIFE & WRITES A LETTER TO THE ORAL ROBERTS
	UNIVERSITY POETRY CLUBDECLINING AN INVITATION 
	TO READ SEVERAL THOUSAND OF HIS TEN MILLION
	HEROIC COUPLETS

	THE MAN
	Who taught me
	The idea of Riemann's geometry

	& Calculus II
	Went
	To prison yesterday

	For grand theft & tax evasion &
	More than a few questions
	About wife number three &
	Four unknown children

While he can go in for details like a Pre-Raphaelite there is still a sense that something is withheld, hidden from us. Thought as mosaic- don't stand too near; it makes sense further away as the fragments assemble again into a coherent picture. He is one of those writers who make the reader do half the work. Some will walk away, puzzled, unsatisfied. It takes a third and fourth reading to excavate the meaning. Behind all this is the death of his father when the writer was sixteen:

	LEG OF A MONARCH BUTTERFLY
	You return again    Like the needle of a compass	Or
	An accusing finger	   Cursing me

	Blaming me always
	For the death
	Of my father

	What good is a poem?  Mother will never tell me
	My father is dying	 She'd have to tell herself first
	Lies are a little bit like the coloured sand

	I was
	Quiet as floor shadow
	Silent as a quart of black paint
	Still as a bottle of India ink
	I have never left that room—Not once

	PLANTING RED MAPLE SAPLINGS

	When I open the earth wide with my spade
	Into a soft coffin of air&
	Pour shredded leaves humus clay &
	A broth of watered muck about the roots