Keeper's Voice

Meeting a local woman at a service project in Appalachia, the narrator of Mike Carson's poem "e;Muse"e; hears from her "e;Those words, iron twang of loss,"e; that "e;cut soft ideas of beauty out."e; Carson's lean, spare collection The Keeper's Voice unflinchingly engages those hard ideas of beauty, of goodness. Direct and often colloquial in their language and traditional in their forms -- blank verse, quatrains, sonnets -- the poems' voices arise from a wide range of viewpoints and situations: from an altar boy thawing a frozen gate lock while early Mass goes on without him, to a returning Vietnam veteran who takes up bull riding; from a boy calling cows in the pre-dawn dark, to a narrator providing instructions for teaching crows to talk; from a new cop, a Christian who must shoot to kill in a ghetto bar, to a family discovering the ashes of a stillborn child among a dead sister's belongings. One poem interweaves locker room slogans with phrases from the Requiem Mass for a friend who died playing football; another centers around a single shout from a wife to her husband threatened by an untethered bull.Refreshingly straightforward, yet suffused with weight, maturity, and passion, The Keeper's Voice projects a wise and uncompromising vision.