A Review of Black Ice by Kerry Shawn Keys

I first encountered Kerry Shawn Keys in the early 1970s at a poetry reading in Philadelphia. As I recall, he was hustling across Broad Street, carrying a large walking stick — brandishing would be more accurate — that looked as though  he had ripped it from a fallen tree and carved a knobby handle on the end. Somehow, I knew all about him, even before I met him — that he had been living in a hunting cabin in the foothills of the Blue Mountains in central Pennsylvania, that he hunted his own game, picked his own berries, and bathed in a warm spring deep in the woods. Oh yes, and that he wrote poetry! I don’t remember who was reading that day. It might have been Jerome Rothenberg or Charles Reznikoff or Robert Bly — certainly  poets worth traversing broad stretches of land to see.

Over four decades later, no longer the young man from the provinces — Keys’ new collection, Black Ice (his 30th or so) retains many important elements of his pastoral, mountain-dwelling past. In “Affinity with Beans,” he writes:

Last evening, I cooked potatoes and kale 
and a fish fresh from the creek. 
All quickly went to mush in my stomach.
Did they find another life there, a congenial rebirth,
or were they merely eaten away 
by the acids of nothingness into a nauseous mortality.

Here we have the Emersonian-Thoreauvian reveling in self-reliance and nature, and yet that innocent transcendental stance has been tempered by experience in the world. Keys spent extended periods of time in Brazil and India and, currently, Vilnius, Lithuania, where he’s lived for over two decades. The poem’s final lines present a more complicated view of the life of a hunter-gatherer:

Part of my supper by now has become part of my flesh,
and should a soul be inseparable from its tenure, 
do all these souls share my sense of oblivion, 
of our time asleep being our only redemption.

Although the natural world, the world of mountains and forests and streams, are still touchstones in Keys’ poetry, there is also the Shamanic, mythic, and primal urge to interact and manipulate that realm. “Ringing the Dead” evokes a terrifying upheaval in the natural order of things. The poet seems to be participating in a ritual where “throats exploded into fiery snakes, / arms and legs baked on the spot…,” where “tongues screamed in tongues” and “Bridesmaids married death.” This could be a scene culled from a dream, but it could also be a description or poetic reenactment of a pagan ritual from a remote region of Brazil or India, or even his current home in Lithuania, the last European country to convert to Christianity. A country rife with primeval forests and mushrooms, and remote villages, traditions suppressed throughout its long history — by the church, the Soviets, and now capitalist financiers.

No matter how far Keys roams from his Appalachian origins, he always seems to arrive — curious and eager to participate — urgently poking around with his carved walking stick. In “Hoffers,” regarding his ancestors — versions of which he encounters in far off places, he admits that he doesn’t

…know much more about them other than 
that they were like my father, all of them orphans. 
Their fathers and grandfathers, also doubtless, itinerant orphans, 
persecuted in their homeland to be rebaptized Pennsylvanian.

There seems to be a primal search in these poems, a search that in its very nature is at best futile and at worst treacherous. In “from Tao Te Ching Meditations, Bones & Buzzards,” a poem about his sojourn in Brazil, the poet (always and forever Orpheus) ends up with his head severed 

[floating] down the river into the jaws 
of the hippopotamus, the razored saws 
of carnivorous, Brazilian piranhas.

At first, I was confused by the presence of hippos in the Amazon. In the Greek version, Orpheus’ head just keeps on singing as it floats downriver; in Keys’ version, the beheading by the Maenads is only the beginning of the terror. And, although I have no way of knowing, I imagine those poet-devouring creatures as part of the escaped hippo-herd, now roaming the Amazon, that once belonged to Columbian drug lord, Pablo Escobar.

A significant number of poems in Black Ice seem to wander off the transcendental-shamanic path into the perhaps wilder and sublime field of fatherhood and family. These poems reflect Keys’ current existence as an expatriated American living in Vilnius, in what was once the Jewish quarter. In “The Curse,” he sketches his new life there:

Black mold on the wall in the kitchen, presque vu,
in the former Jewish ghetto in tonight’s upper room
drunken delirium, the blood of Rabbi Christ 
surfacing as frescoed pentimento long hidden.

The horrific barbarism of the not-so-distant past is ever present, unspoken but always on the tip-of-the-tongue, as he wanders through the old city with his kids. In “All Soul’s Eve (Vilnius),” as his son innocently questions whether the souls of the dead are really present, his daughter whirls about, fluttering her hands, “pretending that she is leaf and dove/let loose from a dark magic theatre above.” At times, Keys’ children — because they are his offspring — participate in the mytho-pagan realm alongside him. Other times, however, the world of fatherhood is more mundane, though hardly less poetic:

Now, there’s no vision of heaven or earth anymore, 
of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower, 
or mortal intimation of immortal, celestial realms 
other than the chirping, glad chorus of my children,
sweet Sonata’s boneless, tumbling, yearling twins

(“Aurora Aurora”)

I hesitate labeling Black Ice a poetic journey, even though it seems to begin with Keys’ actual birthplace and conclude in his newly acquired home and  family. The poems and the poetic gesture of the whole collection are much more complex, nuanced, and captivating. They conjure up the slick, translucent, and reflective surface over which we are bound to slip, glide, and skate, fully aware of the underlying darkness coloring it.  

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