Step On Up: Lawrence Kessenich’s Hard Times Require Furious Dancing

 Step On Up: Lawrence Kessenich’s Hard Times Require Furious Dancing

by Laura Cherry

As a poet, it feels increasingly difficult for me to respond to the times we’re in. I cringe, at best, when I open a news site or glance at a newspaper. The stories that aren’t horrific or overwhelming seem petty and gratuitous – it’s not, let’s say, a fertile environment for creativity. It’s easy to be jaded and even easier to be silent. 

So it was with gratitude and respect that I read Lawrence Kessenich’s Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, a collection whose very title gives us a primer for navigating our difficult present and what is yet to come. I’ve long admired Kessenich’s poems, but for me this is truly the moment, and the collection, for his work to shine. Somehow, he can look at our mixed-up, often menacing world and manage to see the furious dancing all around us.

The dichotomy in the book’s title weaves through its themes of celebration and mourning. For every sorrow, there is a strand of joy. Life and death are co-present even in the most placid vacation scene:

The living cool off in the sea breeze

while the dead float high above.

“No Day at the Beach”

Kessenich is a magpie collector of odd, shiny bits: much of his work springs from quotes, overheard anecdotes, and unusual news items. He sets poems in his back yard and half a world away. He taps into the wonder of our beloved, beleaguered planet, its trees, stars, bees, oceans, lambs, daffodils, mountains, glaciers, and one unfortunate possum. He captures the delicious promise in a bag holding a cookie and a slice of lemon cake from Hi-Rise Bakery, and, on a magical evening, the once-in-a-lifetime realization that “to my astonishment, the planets have aligned for me.”

This is by no means to say that Kessenich’s work is all frolic and froth. On the contrary, these poems are full of both the timely and the timeless trials we face: aging and mortality, natural disasters, political chasms, disease, loneliness, despair. “Zoom-Size” wryly identifies our technology-based alienation from each other:

Everyone in the real world now was

far too big, lifted up on legs that went

all the way down to the ground, 

heads like Halloween pumpkins.

Kessenich doesn’t sugar-coat: this world, this life, this Anthropocene era – they are brutal. But there are compensations. Like beauty. Music. Friendship. And laughter, as in the one-two punch of certain titles and first lines:

Stealing Flowers from the Buddha

He didn’t need them. (Does he need anything?)

Theology

It does seem that God asks a hell of a lot.

Guardian Angels

They were stuck with us, I guess.

Though squarely facing the darkness, these poems are radiant, drawing on a range of spiritual traditions for solace and peace. And they are suffused with love for family, friends, and strangers, who show up here in portraits that reveal their eccentric glory. Kessenich tells his human stories with tenderness and awe, even as he anticipates the post-human hour when “the wind / will blow frictionless across our history.”

Reading this collection brought me back to what I love about this life. It gave me a respite from my own circuitous thoughts, and some glimmers of hope to replace them.

Hard times? Check. Bring on the furious dancing, stat. And read this book.

https://www.lawrence-writer.com/store/p11/Hard_Times_Require_Furious_Dancing_%28Poetry_-_Big_Table_Press%29.html