Midflight

This collection from Sacramento resident Zoe Keithley is the latest offering from local Roan Press. Crow Song is that rarest of things: a poetry collection that uses a single metaphor as an organizing principle. While the crow is not a character (as in Ted Hughes’ famous book), the bird’s natural life illustrates the tone and substance of each section, from the prologue’s (“Crow Song”) to the most muscular, loosely constructed poems in the final section, “The Long Irridescent Flight.” Many of these poems do, in fact, fly: “We kiss and that kiss is a continuum / like a slow-moving river threading / space” (“I Enter You Like Mist”). Or “Nature protects us, for our coupling is / her heartbeat pulsing the mystic blood / to other lovers in other caves murmuring / in embrace …” (“Between the Hills”). Can you hear the rustle of wings in these poems? Yes, oh yes.