The House of Blue Light - (Southern Messenger Poets) by David Kirby (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The House of Blue Light is the second collection of autobiographical "memory poems" by Catholic-school-boy-gone-bad-turned-poet-made-good David Kirby, a stand-up comic of verse if ever there was one: "in Stardust Memories . . . these wise space aliens who visit Earth . . . tell [Woody Allen] that if he really wants to serve humanity, / he should tell funnier jokes--wait, that's my duty, / I think, that's my public duty! Because sooner or later, / we all turn upside down."

Wearing both heart and wit on his sleeve, Kirby confides in longish narrative poems events he actually or vicariously experienced--as a child, a teen, a young man, and now--as well as some future scenes he imagines. Literary theorists Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes; Little Richard and Muhammad Ali; Herman Melville, James Dickey, and Henry James; friends, family, personal heroes, and acquaintances, including the Ah Oui Girl of Paris and Tige Watley's Whoah of Baton Rouge, are all equally alive in Kirby's poems.

As Walt Whitman did, Kirby offers a first-person speaker as a proxy for everyone else ("Who, including ourselves, / knows what we know and when we know it?"), achieving a unity and accessible authenticity rare in poetry. A fun house, "a mishmash for sure," The House of Blue Light is a delightfully entertaining, irreverent, erudite collection of commentary piling upon commentary that brings us "that one element so largely absent / from our quotidian existence, i.e., surprise."

Review Quotes

Behind David Kirby's exuberant and hilarious poems is an immense sophistication. He places his wise-enough-to-be-bemused persona at the center of the human comedy where the pedantic gets deflated, and the quotidian is lovingly elevated to resemble the lives we stumble through and endure. A joy!--Stephen Dunn

David Kirby knows how to turn over the cards of the poem at just the right time and in just the right order. Reading The House of Blue Light makes you feel you are at a dinner party seated next to one of the hippest, funniest men you have ever met and he happens to be speaking in lines.--Billy Collins

I don't believe in blurbs, but David Kirby's new poems increase the oxygen content of American poetry. Kirby has become a master of the walking-talking-white-man blues: his poems have both freedom and soul, heroic looseness and precision; to read them is to get the gossip and the gospel; to be sadder, wiser, and amused.--Tony Hoagland

About the Author

David Kirby, the W. Guy McKenzie Professor of English at Florida State University, is the author of numerous books, including four previous poetry collections, most recently My Twentieth Century and Big-Leg Music. He has contributed poems and essays to such journals as Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Gettysburg Review and is included in Best American Poetry 2000, edited by Rita Dove. He is married to the poet Barbara Hamby and lives in Tallahassee.