The poems in John McKernan's Resurrection of the Dust recall the heavy-hitting, but disparate voices of Whitman, Apollinaire, and James Wright. From the collection's opening poem, "After Entertaining Some Friends at My Mother's House in Omaha I Go Out in the Backyard To Get Some Fresh Air," McKernan establishes the importance of place and lyric observation, offering a nod to Wright's famously anthologized "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" to begin a collection that often reads as a unique homage to the Midwest.
McKernan's strengths, however, are not in the observations and intimations of lyric structure, in which the poem is conveyed in a held moment of time and yields a revelatory poetic turn or insight, such as in Wright's Martins Ferry poem. Instead, his strengths rest in character, invention, and the surreal. In "Mister Sex," the lines "People kept approaching him as if he were/a weather report./Most would leave with either sunshine or/a cloud in their hearts" seem remarkably poignant. In "The Green Children," McKernan uses an inventive extended metaphor, telling of children who slowly become green and invisible to their parents, to portray a kind of frightening mystery revealed in the lines, "Spring and summer terrify their parents the most/Eternal their calls into the blue shadows of twilight/Sometimes the white of the children's eyes will gleam/Not ever to be mistaken for house cat or puma." In the poems "Laundry Lesson," in which he turns "Yesterday" into a female character who both threatens with a butcher knife and attempts to seduce, and "The Napkin," in which a personified napkin takes on such life that "No one could ever speak/The word napkin after that," McKernan conveys with an extreme directness a knack for portraying characters and creating fabrications around them, coupling this skill with a kind of sad humor in "We Heard Schopenhauer Masturbating," a sad irony in "My Brother Tom Whispered" and "My Father Returns From His Grave," and a sad nostalgia in "My Irish Grandfathers." McKernan also expresses the surreal well in insertions of dialogue, such as in the ending of the poem, "The Funeral of Death," when "A thin wounded man A lamb tucked under one arm/Whispers 'Give everything away' 'This is not a stickup.'"
Unfortunately, McKernan's weakness in working with lyric structure can greatly detract from these strengths. In "The Apple Orchard," in which the speaker recalls heading home from an apple orchard to his bedroom, McKernan's sudden conclusion seems overly grand and out of place: "Only my body/Ever slept there/Oarsman to Death/The blind stars/Always my shepherd." Similarly, in "I Orderlied at County Hospital," which begins, "In Omaha I saw them take it all/Away From hair to toenails/And every in-between thing/I never stopped thinking/Of my father," the poem seems to move in a direction of revealing deeply personal emotion, yet the conclusion, "Death never wanted the body/It always wanted the Diamond The Soul," comes across too dramatically. These endings, as do those of other poems in the collection, risk feeling disconnected or emotionally empty, not prepared for by what the poems seem, at first, to promise.
These failings bring up the main issue of the volume as a whole, which is its length and subsequent organization. At 210 pages of writing, Resurrection of the Dust appears to be more a volume of collected poems than it does the writer's first full-length collection, the latter of which is the actual case and which normally falls anywhere from 50 to 100 pages. Like a 'collected' poems, this volume displays McKernan's writing at varying stages of talent, one of the poems being credited as far back as 1972. With a particularly ironic title for a collection encompassing such a large span of work that is marked by various influences, Resurrection of the Dust would better play to McKernan's strengths if it represented only the best of his writing.
For instance, in "A Hand Mirror in the Garden," describing a mirror at night, McKernan writes, "It seems/Someone has gone &/Dusted it with a raven's wing/Rinsed it with black well water/Polished it with a shadow from the moon," yet the succession of descriptions he offers don't reveal anything more to the reader emotionally than the first description. In "Coded Message," the lines "I was/Quiet as a floor shadow/Silent as a quart of black paint/Still as a bottle of India ink" also appear to belabor McKernan's point, rather than to illuminate. McKernan is, however, extremely successful with the use of successive similes in the poem "Daylight Contaminated by Memory," when he writes, "...A torrent of names/Would rise Like brittle chopper fire/Like the whisper of an ambulance/At a great distance....Like sounds spoken/Only once At a baptism or a wedding"—offering a gorgeous sequence in which a reader can probe for, and find, deeper and deeper meaning.
The reader's experience of McKernan's work is not helped however, when it seems nearly forgotten in the volume's organization. The poems are ordered alphabetically by title—an arrangement that makes a definitive statement. Although in some instances this helps connect the poems and gives the appearance of poetic sequences, such as with the five poems titled "A Man," and plays on one of McKernan's topics—that of alphabets—it in general fails to create a structure that either adds meaning or simply helps a reader to navigate the volume's length, almost deeming the reader's experience to be unimportant, and making gorgeous passages and inventive characters seem much too few.—Ashlie Kauffman