John Kelly (E)
Abbreviations (PDF)
Boosey & Hawkes
Brother's eight songs include four poems by John Kelly – poetry that captures so well a gay man's pursuit of love, sex and connection in a big "metal" city. Poignantly evoked are the loneliness of dark bars, backrooms and baths, ... the sudden bright light of connection to an "ardent" reciprocating partner, ... and the pains of geographical separation ("soon to be 3000 miles away") and of memory ("This solid ground warps under the memory of you").
A love so relentlessly self-centered seems to illuminate only the author, while the partners, often shifting, remain in shadow. Perhaps the obsessive first song ("I I I I I") encapsulates this quality most succinctly. And (speaking of self-centeredness) towards the end of the last song, "Brother," I "sign" my own name, i.e., the baritone counts, in Italian, from one (uno) to 13 (tredici).
Complementing and contrasting with his own, Kelly has chosen four more poems. "Personals Ad" (by Allen Ginsberg) is ? in its funny and graphic detail ? just that: a newspaper advertisement of available self. Paul Monette's "Here," in contrast, is a searing, graveside lament ("everything extraneous has burned away") over the loss of a partner to AIDS. Jaime Manrique's "Matthew Shepard" elegizes the young man whose long, slow death, tied to a Wyoming fence, confronted the nation with perhaps its starkest example of late-20th-century homophobia. The poem focuses upon that ecstatic moment when Matthew Shepard's soul leaves his pain-wracked body and "ascends." By contrast, Lewis Carroll's "Alice"-inspired "Acrostic Song" relieves the somber mood. Victorian words of rapture, tinged only slightly with regret, recall the poet's blissful boating trips up the Thames with the three enchanting Liddell sisters. The first letter of each line spells out acrostically the name of the real-life Alice ? Alice Pleasance Liddell ? for whom Carroll wrote his famous stories and collected them together under the title, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
At the end of the work, Kelly's title-song, "Brother," brings us back to a much grittier world than that of the Liddell sisters ? a real world where connection and love are inevitably burdened by countervailing forces.