Toccata & Fugue

I am reviewing the final galleys for Toccata & Fugue, by Timothy Kelly, winner of the 2005 Floating Bridge Press Poetry Chapbook Award. It's a lovely collection of poems. Tim is a Physical Therapist in Olympia, WA, and his intimate familiarity with the human body, its traumas and healings, is so evident in these top-notch poems.

Here is the opening poem in the chapbook:


WAKING THE DOZERS

Wherever they are, tripping
and twitching on their morphine drips,
or laid out lax in a dayroom, I squeeze
their feet, sing out their names, fetch them,
Orpheus-like, back to the too-brilliant brim
of the world. There is,

of course, bewilderment. There are lines
and belts and their legs lifted twiglike
and swept out of bed. There are their knees
blocked by my knees, the calibrated
leaning back, and the length of them
levered up to some brief, provisional

perpendicular. Let me see your eyes
I say then, and most, hummingbird-hearted,
do. And we rock a minute
on the linoleum while they reacquaint
themselves with the sheared apart and
strangely wired-back-together world

they’ve been, for the last while,
out of. It’s not fixed yet, they say;
put me back to bed. And I say it is fixed,
really. Let’s try some steps.


Timothy Kelly will read from his newly released chapbook on Tuesday, June 28th, 2005, at 7pm, Richard Hugo House, 1634 -11th Avenue, in Seattle, along with the finalists Nancy Pagh, Bethany Reid, and Annette Spaulding-Convy. A reception and book-signing follows. Admission is free.


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