[REVIEW] My Dreadful Darling by Shannon Kirk

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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As a musician, I’ve heard others discuss how those who don’t normally play percussion are often good at it because they go with what feels and sounds right and are not distracted by rules and regulations. Reading Shannon Kirk’s My Dreadful Darling made me think of that. Kirk is an accomplished writer, but she’s a novelist with a knack for creepy, dark, eloquent thrillers, not a poet. However, she writes poetry, which makes her a poet, and this collection proves it. In the introduction to this book, she talks about writing poetry as a little girl and then hiding or destroying it and how that practice followed her into adulthood. Then came the pandemic, and with it came this exercise, which morphed into a wonderful book.

“In these pages, I’ve compiled poems, thoughts, letters, and questions I’ve plucked from my published novels, from works in progress, from drafts of manuscripts that changed in the course of editing, my journals, and from fragments of bits I’ve generated over many years,” states Kirk in her introduction. In other word, this is a collection built from fragments, notes, thought, and words from other books. That said, it all fits together well because different kind of love and death are cohesive elements that make this feel interconnected.

The beauty of My Dreadful Darling is how it seems like a collection of things found in other places, meant for other books, but then it turns into something unified in which the voice carries through while wearing different masks. Love, for example, is present in many of the poems, but it’s love that goes from that of a mother to a lover, from unrequited to explosive, from painful to playful. Kirk writes about going and staying, about inhabit the places where things are wrong but where we hover above moment and do nothing to put an end to it, to move to a safer place. She also writes about the spaces where love lives all by itself, drowning in memories or anger or distance:

“Of the thousand things

I passed today, none were themselves

All were you

Of the thousand sounds

An hour ago, none were anything

But your voice

In this city, from the country, to the other sea

Where you live

Is there anything other than you?

Your breath?

Am I to encounter anything at all

But you?”

Yes, love, ghosts, lists, memories; they are all pieces of things we collect to form a life, and Kirk collects them here to show us a variety of lives, to open the door to her story and to other stories she has created. The result is a collection with superb rhythm that dances between the anger of a scorned lover unsatisfied with what she has to the mellowness and warmth of a day spent enjoying an unstructured existence in which looking at the clock isn’t necessary:

“We’ve gone to the other extreme now

Poking sticks in ponds to watch ripples

Biding time, watching clouds, doing nothing

But we are happy, listless with schedules scattered

This life unstructured tic toes in time we threw away”

Some of the poems in My Dreadful Darling have notes that inform readers of where they come from or what work in progress they belong to, but these notes are ultimately irrelevant because Kirk’s natural talent for rhythm overpowers everything. The notes and the introduction let the reader know this is a Frankenstein’s monster of poetry, but the sum of its parts makes its fragmented nature irrelevant. Take the last lines of “Lisa’s Preference for Painting,” which come from Kirk’s novel Viebury Grove but stand as a testament to her cadence:

“Painting exercises muscle control, vision acuity,

requires knowledge of pigment and chemistry,

measurements and scaling, study of anatomy, and

honing of sight for depth control. Painting requires

mental and physical strength. Love brings weakness.”

My Dreadful Darling is a good thing born of a bad time. Kirk used the time the pandemic forced her to stay locked in to dig through her words and put this together. However, more than an engaging experiment, it turned into a collection of poems that revealed another talent. I hope we never go through a pandemic again, but I hope something else forces Kirk to mine her past, present, and future works again so that isn’t her last book of poems.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.