At times the writing in this thin volume is slow and careful in rhythm - lilting like easy waves lapping at the reader's ankles - but then it all turns, as if on the tip of a needle, towards fast staccato beats that rush forward and lay one flat. Wash over your head in a fierce tidal wave. Leave you startled and gulping oxygen on the shore. These poems know what they're doing. They're lived in and precise - full of well-worn flesh and whispered echoes of bluesy guitar floating upon air laced with cigarette smoke. Truth resides here as well. Lilley's verse weaves stark realism with the spiritual, crafting myths of honest witness to the good, the bad, and all the shades of in between coloring this earth. Quietly lovely and then brazen and arresting in the exhilaration emitted. Drugs and booze, love and hate, life and death all sing inside the covers of this collection. And, after putting it down, one is left sensing a renewed and refreshed contact with the world.
The sweet musk of plowed dirt, over country
as dark as the chamber of a cold heart
or an oiled pistol. The melancholy
of whiskey and guitar, a blue steel night.
No moon slash or razor. There is no star
as good a guide as the tombstone neon
that hangs over the long bar, the half-full glass
where talk swings dry, thin, and quick, and red eye
cigarettes beckon through the haze. Jukebox
jumps, a saxophone pushes smoke to the ceiling.
A rattle of bullets and ball and chain,
the dust raising dance of hoodoo saints.
A prayer sung like rainfall, and everyone
that you see in there is already gone.
-from the collection, written by Gary Copeland Lilley
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