Have You Had Enough Darkness Yet?
These striking poems build their energy and gather resilience from silence, breath, and daily noticing. Whether describing the domestic foreign, or supernatural, Have You Had Enough Darkness Yet? asks us to pause in Keatsian awe as McKinney names a bright world of her own fashioning. Lines like 'I was trying, and trying,/to live in this house,/to sleep in the sleep place,/to pass into my room, to find/the rooms within the rooms,/the house the house lives in,/the gradual home' epitomize this poet's restless spirit. 'Nobody spoke to me in the womb,/nobody sang the song of the high intelligence,' McKinney confesses, 'I didn't know much when I arrived/ and that is still the case.' Nothing could be further from the truth, however. Throughout this collection, McKinney's 'fierce eye/sees everything' and -- in a language both accessible and lyrical -- 'finds it good. --Dorianne LauxI'm overwhelmed by the underlying theme of this book, and by the language in which it is expressed. It starts in the very first poem and there is no let-up. The freedom is amazing. It's as if -- sadly -- she can finally come to terms with life just when it is leaving her. Whether there is self-pity or not is irrelevant. What this book is is consciousness on fire, the dream come true -- 'plangent, like a bell. --Gerald SternSadly we have lost Irene McKinney, one of America's most original, irreplaceable, irrepressible poets. But we have her poetry; 'clear-eyed, cleansed and purified / by a lifetime of simply fooling around' -- the work of an undeceived and free mind, a pungent, knowing tongue, language so fresh and memorable that it catches truth by the sleeve, an unbound spirit that can say, at the last: 'I have passed the broken and the body's / choice and fate. And this is where I am. --Eleanor Wilner