Miramont Park and Other Poems by John Paul McKinney

 

How young and fresh is this voice, this Octogenarian’s full-throated song. There is an energy here that issues in hope.  Even in a series of Covid poems or in lines about the murder of his  black “brother,” there is always hope, as in these final stanzas of the poem, “Advent”:

 

Now night reveals the fingernail slice of moon.

That thief in the sky, stealing her light from the sun

Swelling and swelling, night after night

Like the belly of the Woman who can no longer contain

 

Her audacious, urgent gift of Light

That bursts with hope to smash the dark.

 

Hope as womb pulsing with life runs through these hope-pregnant poems, culminating in a postscript poem about words themselves as bright living things the poet has been digging to find, like a fisherman digging for worms in the pregnant earth.  In a beautiful echo and expansion of Seamus Heaney’s poem, “Digging,” McKinney writes:

 

Now here I start to dig again

….

Digging deeper, digging still

Searching for the words ….

Bright words that ring on open air

To catch my reader unaware

To catch my reader unaware.

–Fr. Murray Bodo, OFM, author of Francis: The Journey and The Dream and Canticle: The Beauty of Art’s Intrusion

 

 

Miramont Park and Other Poems, John Paul McKinney‘s debut collection, offers readers a series of finely-wrought poems, each of which ponders the luminous mystery of the human condition.  Set during the year of Coronavirus, the poignant sonnet sequence that gives the book its title traces in loving detail the effects of the pandemic on the small community of humans who frequent a local park. The poet’s rapt attention to the movements of the heart and mind, as well as the spirit, in response to challenging circumstances continues in the “Slew of Sunday Sonnets” that follow, a series of vivid epiphanies that reveal the many manifestations of extraordinary faith in ordinary people. Finally, the volume’s concluding tour-de-force celebration of the vocation of poetry reminds us that all poetry, including the splendid poems in this delightful ensemble, is ultimately an act of faith, an act of hope, and, most of all, an act of love.

–Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, author of Andalusian Hours, Love in the Time of Coronavirus, and  Holy Land