Lucky Witness - Paperback

One senses that Kathleen Lynch -- in her brilliant, sometimes devastating book -- intends her title to be read un-ironically. As in Ingmar Bergman films, the poems cast a light on various darknesses that in their exposures, their witnessing, are the essential cries and whispers of poetry. In "Throes," she says, "The saint flung himself / into a thorn bush to incur / wounds worthy of his joy." Lynch's poems have that kind of complexity, and seem to know "We need a face / to express the hidden / face." When that face is found, as it often is in these poems, it contains a voice, which can make us smile as well as wince at life's absurdities.