Quotes:
“A fine book by a poet whose expansive heart and swift sympathetic
eye draw the reader's empathy and admiration. In poem after poem, she
defies expectation and eludes the purely sentimental by offering a new
twist on an old perspective.” —Carol Muske Dukes, Los Angeles Times
Book Review
"When I read Deborah Keenan's poetry, I always think
of jazz —the spaces she allows as essential as the notes she strikes. I
think of Count Basie. I think of Fred Hersh, of themes circling back
around to gratify and haunt. As a writer of novels I am awed by her
telling of a story —how she gathers the threads, testing their weight
against what she knows and then weaving them into the powerful fabric
of truth. How does she divine their word count? How can she take these
thoughts and wishes and searches and dreams and turn them into such
simple victories without ever seeming to make a judgment? In her poem
The BirdHouse, she mentions the stories of humans and animals, “never
perfectly told or understood.' I would beg to differ with her on that”
—Judith Guest
"The poems in Good Heart are a charm against
disaster —imagine loss that can be made right again by pure
dream-power, by elegy. The world is drifting away, but Deborah Keenan,
in these brave and reverberant poems, calls it back, makes its pulse
strong again, breathes bold life into the lyric” —Carol Muske-Dukes
“Her
poems, sometimes autobiographical, always intimate, explore the
psychological landscape of late middle ages. Loss —of youth, parents
and friends —is the chief theme, yet these are not grim poems.
Althought mortality is ever-present, it is less a dark specter than a
realization that enhances the value of each day spent above ground.
Keenan's poems are more conversational than lyrical, and a few read
more like thoughtful journal entries than rendered poems. Her very best
poems are beautiful, often surreal, with sharp images derived from
workaday life, nature and dreams. Some are difficult to navigate, but
worth the effort.” —Pamela Miller, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“In
Good Heart, her sixth collection of poems, Deborah Keenan reminisces
about the past, recounts dreams, hears voices in dreams, walks in a
park, plants a garden, tends a grandchild, mourns a dead Labrador
retriever, visits deceased family members, and contemplates the
condition of life, and death —all at the same time and almost in the
same breath.... Litany-like, the poems use fragments, ambiguous words,
unusual punctuation, unexpected line breaks, unexpected breaks within
lines, and several voices. The result is a surreal quality reminiscent
of the paintings of Marc Chagall. The angle of vision changes, with the
poet dancing on rooftops or flying, while Keenan notices everything
—from her mother's “green taffeta dress/ Drifts, no, plummets, no
falls'; to the baby “turned to an open window/ Full of golden wind.' .
. . A poem about planting a garden becomes one about searching for
beauty and finding it in her own mortality, as the words seem to brush
past the mind, not meaning so much as making the elctricity of
meaning.” —Diane Scharper, The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Good Heart
deserves its name: it is a heartening book in every way, all the more
so for appearing at this unusually difficult time in American history.
These are poems in which passion drives intelligence, but intelligence
also drives passion. The music is powerfully insistent and underscores
the urgency of the poet's voice, at once vatic and personal. The
subjects are our American subjects--family and its attendant joys and
griefs, American cultural realities and their attendant bitterness and
hopes and so much more that can't easily be named, but which has to do
with that particularly American longing for home understood as an
intersection of the natural world, the world of community, and the
spiritual world. The book goes a long way towards imagining and
embodying such a home. In her poem After D.H.Lawrence, Keenan
writes,“Trees. We want their beautiful/Breath on our skin” And we want
—need —"the beautiful breath”of her poems on our skin, too. I feel very
grateful that Deborah Keenan's Good Heart has come into my life at this
particular moment. I believe that many others will feel the same way.
—Jim Moore
"Can poems be both elegant and sincere? Reading
Deborah Keenan's newest work shows that sincerity is the highest form
of elegance. Years from now, when people search for news of what it was
to be human, they could do far worse than to come upon this book, and
so could we —to have them judge us in its light” — Jim Krusoe
"I
loved reading this book. I kept wanting to shout, Friends, prepare to
succumb to the mystery of the noun. Prepare to fall in love and want
your heart to be good and live!" —Sharon Chmielarz, author The Other
Mozart
"Deborah Keenan's disarmingly conversational language
fragments and fuses with imagery startled from dream, producing poems
that disorient and challenge our perceptions, even as they delight us
with their inventions. These poems have crucial qualities much American
poetry lacks —an original, compelling voice, and a“slant”angle of
vision Dickinson would approve. Wise and moving, these are poems to
cherish. —Susan Ludvigson
"Good Heart reads like a visitation
from a kind spirit who smooths our hair, makes us comfortable in our
own skin, yet shows us how very much we all live outside ourselves. The
bones of poems like After Happiness and Signing My Name in the Book of
the Dead remind us we have no choice but to live in theflesh. Poems
like Hope and Good Heart teach us how to go about that living. —Heid
Erdrich
"That quality of writing that invites a deepening
interior experience of reading.... Keenan rewraps her undone nouns and
adjectives, and lays them down on the page with reverence” —www.smartishpace.com/home/reviews_smallen.html
"This is a
surprisingly clean and thoughtful book, and anyone who doubts whether
Keenan can create images when she wants to should be forced to swallow
The Last Lion whole” —Alvaro Cardona-Hine
"What do we find inside
the Good Heart: one's poet's unstoppable joy of living long enough to
know what's been lost and what's worth lamenting. The valuable life
(and the life of these poems) is one infused with earthly connection
and the failures to connect. Keenan's best poems possess a dream-like
danger or threshold where some question must be precariously embraced,
shared, tested. As the 'small queen of prophecy,' she writes out of a
convincing phantasmagoria of friendship found and lost, of dead parents
and crows, of powerful, young women, of the wandering soul with an
argument for divine ambivalance, the pesky, vivid and humbling
reminders of death and the dead who travel in our present, of time
devoured and restored through family and children. It is full, this
heart —fierce, tender, judgmental, loving, curious, confused —and
always open to the lonely, carnival complications of the world. —J.P.
White
"One of the central subjects of these new poems by Deborah
Keenan is the wind —which in poetry is often the breath of inspiration;
inspiration, the breath and daily breadth of it, governs these poems
just as the contemplation of death does. The light and intensity of
that contemplation —the light that death gives to our lives —interfuses
Deborah Keenan's beautiful poems and gives them their particular
brilliance. —Charles Baxter
"'The poems in Good Heart elevate
the 'ordinary' images of our lives and endow them with meaning and
beauty. Keenan's work unveils the secret messages the world often
whispers to us —messages that, were it not for these poems we would
never hear” —Julie Schumacher
"Deborah Keenan writes heart-pomes
in the language of feeling: She is a homesick pilgrim obsessed with
human connection” —Carol Conroy
“Poems of extraordinary power.... Their tone
is precise: the force stemming from the taut directness of the voice.
What the voice speaks of are daily pains, difficult love, the bonds of
children and memory, survival. . . .. Without question, Household
Wounds is a remarkable book.”--
Minnesota Monthly
“Good Heart is a
unique collection of free-verse poetry by Deborah Keenan who deals with
mature themes, wistful longing for what is lost, the eternal beacon of
hope, cherished memories, and more. Good Heart is recommended as being
an evocatively written and lyrically moving work.” —Bookwatch, Midwest
Book Review
“Keenan's poems show an awareness of her mortality
not as a morbid fascination, but as a way of infusing her life with a
“spiritual buzz' that comes from living as if she were dying. Keenan's
poems take us to the edge, peering over in search of understanding.”
—Minnesota Literature Newsletter
“Litany-like, the poems use
fragments, ambiguous words, unusual punctuation, unexpected line
breaks, unexpected breaks within lines, and several voices...Deborah
Keenan's verse blends reality and dreams” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Good
Heart is a unique collection of free-verse poetry by Deborah Keenan who
deals with mature themes, wistful longing for what is lost, the eternal
beacon of hope, cherished memories, and more. Good Heart is recommended
as being an evocatively written and lyrically moving work.” —The
Midwest Book Review
“The collection “Good Heart” is a fine book
by a poet whose expansive heart and swift sympathetic eye draw the
reader's empathy and admiration. In poem after poem, she defies
expectation and eludes the purely sentimental by offering a new twist
on a old perspective...” —The Los Angeles Times
"Keenan proves a
master descriptor of the funny, yet sad and poignant moment … Written in
an accessible sometimes prose-like style, these verses are easily
ingested but not easily forgotten, leaving the reader to ponder deeper
meanings.” —City Pages
"Deborah Keenan is generous in word and
deed, pulling images from the everyday life around us..”Erica Jong
snapped up my copy on the spot when I showed it to her” --Minneapolis
City Pages
"(excerpt) … The memories within these pages are varied,
as they should be, and create a depth of spirit that is profound as
well as touching. At heart, these poems are ruminations. Images give
way to careful thoughts which are turned over and over again, the
context ballooning outward before pulling back into something beautiful
and personal. (para) Often times these ruminations turn self-conscious
by calling attention to the relationship between poet and reader.
Sometimes the effect is humorous … .At other times it underscores the
importance of an image … .Throughout this collection Keenan speaks to
what's important. Sometimes it's love. Sometimes it's loss. And in
every case she delivers. Consider the simple beauty of 'In
Emerald'”--Jim Redmond, The Corresponder
"Keenan's poems keep me
reading, I think, in part, because she asks questions, as if engaged in
conversation with herself or another person in the poem. This results
is a sometimes quirky yet always engaging style. Even when writing
about death and loss, her humor keeps me from taking everything so
seriously. Or else, this questioning causes me to stop, to reconsider,
to see things differently. Her words are precise and unpretentious.
She's a master of form, making good use of repetition, internal rhyme,
the inventive line and stanza break, and the prose poem.... Her images
are striking, sometimes shocking ... Keenan's understanding of human
emotion is profound. She can see the world as if through a child's eyes
often yearning, sometimes brutally honest.... I love every poem in this
collection ... Maybe Keenan speaks to me because she seems to live her
poetry, and with her questions, come to greater clarity.” -- KLIATT,
Sue E. Budin.
“The most powerful poems in Deborah Keenan's new
collection, Good Heart , feel like dreams, which, one realizes with a
strange mixture of relief and apprehension, may not be dreams at all.
“His Red Chair”is a signature example: its opening declaration is
followed by one run-on sentence strung together with inconclusive
commas, exactly as we experience catastrophe, as if any relation
between sequence and meaning has been severed: (poetry excerpt“His Red
Chair") Keenan's passions present themselves best when well wrapped in
diffidence, as represented by the discomfiting“I guess”of the poem's
sixth line, the words that transform this poem. Is this the“I
guess:”of“I'm not sure I remember”or the“I guess”of“we might have made
some other choice at this particular moment,”or both? Either way, it
centers the text in some risky emotional territory that the report, for
all the crystalline detail, fails to illumine. That's the point. In
this case we're engaged with the opposite of nostalgia. Keenan reminds
us again and gain in this book not to expect much from memory, even
though, these poems concede, that's what we're left with. (para) On the
other hand, the title poem is flawed by a self-referential voice that
employs a mild sarcasm. Too bad, because the idea is a good one —a
self-critique of the“good heart" —the person who understands, forgives,
makes or pretends to make things better. It's promising material, but
the poem's self-consciousness is mismanaged; it doesn't quite come off:
(excerpt from“Good Heart") Anger sometimes comes disguised as
self-mockery or abasement, and I think that's the truth (or one of
them) this poem is aimed at. But the tone doesn't succeed in unveiling
emotional truth, only in being unpleasant, and after several readings
I'm still asking myself if its just me, or if the parrot in the third
line is a non-sequitur? I await other's wisdom on this point. But many
other poems navigate the murky waters of memory, dream , and experience
with skill and grace such as“In Florida, As Smoke Billows Across the
Highway / inside the black and white dream": (excerpt from poem) “In
Florida”is one of the few poems in Good Heart that abstains from the
old-fashioned habit of capitalizing the first word in each line, though
I can't say what conclusion we might draw from this fact. As a reader,
one hopes that many more dreams like this one will come Keenan's way”
-- Kate Moos
“Deborah Keenan has
been living the life of a poet and a mentor most of her adult life. She
is, as she would say, 'a worker bee,' constantly reading, teaching, and
writing. She is the kind of teacher who comes to class laden with bags
of books, notes and activities, ready to inspire and challenge.... In
March of 2003, eight years after the release of her last major book,
Milkweed Editions celebrated the release of Good Heart. Just two days
after America went to war with Iraq, the atmosphere could have been
somber, subdued; instead, the auditorium--filled with fellow poets,
friends, colleagues, current and former students--overflowed capacity.
Many waited in the lobby to listen to the reading over the public
address system. It was a celebration, attended by such literary
luminaries as Charles Baxter, Jim Moore, and others. (para) Good Heart
is a logical follow-up to her last book, Happiness. In fact a working
title at one point was After Happiness, taken from the long poem that
opens this collection. It explores our deeply human qualities, how we,
through something more meaningful than mere resilience, maintain a
sense of meaning in our lives. (para) . . . What strikes me most about
this book is the idea of claiming.... But to say that it is just
'claiming' is to deny the deeper resonance of these poems. they are
about violence and redemption, honesty, and honoring art's place in the
world--in short, the virtues of goodness, of having a 'good heart': the
poet as guardian of the human experience. (para) In looking at the
complicated issue of human experience, it is almost too easy to miss
the fact that Keenan is a very good lyric poet. She loves the trees the
way D.H. Lawrence did. She loves wind. She loves light. The poems in
this book are testaments to the life lived as an artist: hard-won,
unpretentious, unflinching, and yes, moving. They are, as poet and
Elizabeth Alexander has said, 'Brave and Beautiful.'” -
http://threecandles.org/reviews/dkeenan_review.html
"True story:
I was walking with poet Deborah keenan one day on a well traveled
avenue in St. Paul when a van pulled up beside us and a young man
clambered out with a bouquet and handed the flowers to Deborah. She
thanked him graciously and kept walking. He was a student of hers.
That's the kind of devotion she attracts as a teacher. This March, I
went to a reading for her fifth collection of poetry, Good Heart,
published by Milkweed Press. The auditorium held 500 people, but it
wasn't big enough for everyone who came. . .that's the kind of devotion
she attracts as a poet and reader. Deborah Keenan is generous in word
and deed, pulling images from the everyday life around us. (para and
excerpt) And there's humor.... go out and buy your own copy. It'll do
your heart good” —City Pages, Katherine Lanpher
