It took poet Kevin Finn 10 years to complete his latest collection, but it wasn’t for lack of material. Quite the contrary: Finn said the 69-page “Consequence of Dream” (Six Gallery Press) was once a 258-page manuscript he had to spend a year whittling down.
“A lot of it became a process of refining what I had. And that's always difficult because the language is not so refined,” Finn said.
The 42 poems channel Finn’s responses to matters ranging from global environmental crises to the pandemic.
“Every day, I relearn the measures / of survival, to let go, / to recognize impermanence,” he writes in “Bushfire.” “What do we do now, / when things are changing so rapidly -- / the near impossible sense / of how to respond, to tread the water / of fate, to conjure luck within / the energetic body of the planet.”
Latter portions of the book lean more toward expressing hope and rebirth, as in “Early May”: “It was every spring, / every turning leaf / so jubilantly aware.”
Along the way there are a handful of the satiric “dream” poems that give the collection its title — surrealistically comic narratives like one about a brand of North Korean cigarettes called “This,” engineered to “cure cancer if smoked in small amounts.”
Those five poems, the longest in the collection, were also the last written, during the early days of the pandemic.
Finn, who hosted a book launch May 7, at Bloomfield’s brillobox, said he started writing poetry after an eighth-grade group project to write a sonnet about baseball. He grew up in Glenshaw, and went on to earn a master’s-of-fine-art degree at Carlow University. His first collection, “Sea of Dust,” was published in 2013.
Finn is also a visual artist, martial artist, and musician. He thinks of poetry as primarily imagistic.
“Poetry is a very streamlined way of making visual art into words,” he said. “It's just like taking like a bunch of pictures, like Polaroids or something, and take putting a string through them and just creating like, rows of those.”
“I'm just trying to, like, observe, I think,” he said. “We all have our inner lives. I just happen to sometimes write poems from what I'm seeing, and creat[e] something that allows me to be a little more personal about what I'm seeing. I mean. I think everyone would have a unique poem, right?”
