In the Ghost-House Acquainted
Kevin Goodan
2005 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award
Goodan’s mesmerizing first collection wells out of a deeply lived rural life, with all its beauty and brutality. These soulful lyrics use allusive imagery and ecumenical diction to consider the pastoral as a life to inhabit, not an artifact or idealized place to visit. Here, the specter of loss makes a world more precious—notions of home and love must be ever-evolving as colts are stillborn and pigeons slaughtered, apple blossoms frozen in spring and dead lambs burned in diesel fire. But, these poems insist, there is beauty in the soil and beauty in birth; and death in birth; and beauty there, in death, as well.
"...a voice that connects joy with holiness, and sorrow with mystery, and all of this in a language as sharp as flint and as earthborn as the lamb....In the Ghost-House Acquainted is extraordinary."
—Mary Oliver, in her judge's citation for the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award
“…laid-back, and yet elegantly formal poems…call to mind Robert Frost in their reflecting on the day-to-day details of a rural existence, both the drudgery of tasks like feeding livestock and the quiet meditations on nature.”
—Library Journal
"Goodan's poems envision the world as a quiet haunting, reminding us of our place as the few alive in a world overflowing with the spent energy of the dead. He posits the natural world not as an idol to be worshipped, but as an essential vehicle for spiritual survival and transcendence. Death and loss have never been so full of hope as they are in In the Ghost House Acquainted."
—The Adirondack Review
"It is rare to see a poet work so hard in the physical world—serious farm labor—and still catch a fleeting glimpse of the spirit. Kevin Goodan does this convincingly because his language is so precise and his mind knows when to jump and when to stand still. This is a remarkable book."
—James Tate
"Kevin Goodan's austere poems have an eye and ear trained on the holiness of commonplace details like 'the darkness that comes after fire.' We can take comfort in the fact that his address to the natural world is so unflinchingly direct, for these poems are bathed in alchemical light."
—Peter Gizzi
"Kevin Goodan’s poems can arrive like dumptrucks of grief, crushing gravel and fauna, torching the place, sending ash across the landscape; others unfold quietly, with reverence, working like scripture, having a kind of religious hush to them. All of them are absolutely devoid of cynicism and flippancy. It’s a unique (and often startling) experience to read them."
—Michael Earl Craig
about the author
Raised on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Western Montana, Kevin Goodan began working for the U.S. Forest Service at a young age, and attended the Universities of Montana and Massachusetts. He has lived in Northern Ireland, and lectured at universities on terrorism. His poems have been published in Ploughshares and other journals. Currently, he resides on a small farm in Western Massachusetts.
Author photo by Rebecca Wiggins
two poems from in the ghost-house acquainted
review of in the ghost-house acquainted from kingdom books
