Brevity, a collection of sixty poems, focuses on how ordinary human lives intersect in brief, particular moments. The author weaves thoughtful paths of interlacing and repeating metaphors through doubt, uncertainty, and solitude, turns and defeats, to the deeply rewarding joys of generational family — and, ultimately, to a resounding, final sense of belonging.
Brevity, a collection of sixty poems, focuses on how ordinary human lives intersect in brief, particular moments. The author weaves thoughtful paths of interlacing and repeating metaphors through doubt, uncertainty, and solitude, turns and defeats, to the deeply rewarding joys of generational family — and, ultimately, to a resounding, final sense of belonging.
Porchlight
It was a fine, chill night rain
of dark drops that fell almost unnoticed until they landed with tiptoes
to shiver silver and soft in the porchlight, tiny beads like a mote's tears
that reflected, each one, the broad night
and the small, warm point of yellow light on their delicate round mirror faces
— 1990
Shades of Grey
Okay, all right — so I'd rather
amble slowly under the murky sky and stark black-green
branched and leafy silhouettes
and spend my attention on how the big, just-risen almost-full moon's
not-quite-white
grey
not-quite-round
oblong
muted brilliance turns the murk a dark misty shade of grey
ever
so
silently
showing me peace
and how to just do my job without fussing about myself
than stay inside, in the decorum and clamor
of business being conducted and souls blind to the moon rushing around
— 1989
Not much
I was feeling like not much at all,
except maybe a lifeless rock lying hot in the desert sun, or maybe the
thin grey watery oatmeal
that goes neglected at the edge of the pot
— I was feeling like not much at all,
except not good,
because the few stars showed wan and flat on the pallid sky
through the smog and lit night of the city,
because Orion's scabbard and the Pleiades
did not shine like glittering double handfuls of jewels
on fire in all the blackness,
but rather were much like
only two or three drops of watery milk
on a tacky and worn, pale plastic blue tablecloth
— 1989
John Kerl’s Brevity is something of a marvel. It is a sophisticated, exemplary demonstration of poetic craft. It is a moving balance of narrative and lyrical practices. And, though Kerl’s skill certainly earns the poet the right to flaunt, the poems (especially due to Kerl’s carefully constructed speaker) remain modest, vulnerable, and honest throughout.
Poetry collections can explore temporality in unique ways. By arranging memories in relation to one another and across thematic lines with imagistic anchors, Kerl makes full use of the form’s potential in his curated collage of experiences. Each poem concludes with a date (sometimes a season and a date). These bits of context not only ground the reader in specific moments of the poet-speaker’s life, but also invite us to read the work with an additional genre layer—there is something of a diary at work here. The poems include family histories, specific moments or recurring connections with loved ones, and introspection in such a way that the audience becomes aware of chronologies of feeling and knowing.
Kerl’s control of the line is masterful. Simple, plainspoken language builds powerful images and compelling reflections. Each line break bears the marks of great intention, and Kerl does not hesitate to vary between short, meaningfully clipped lines and others that reach further into the white space, allowing the language to breathe.
Fellow poets reading the collection will find Brevity’s speaker, the persona Kerl has developed to voice the individual poems, an enviable creation. The speaker exhibits all of the impressive and expressive powers one expects of a practiced poet attentive to the world and life around them. But there is also a deep invitation that Kerl’s speaker makes to change and the possibilities of a transforming self. In “Seasons” for example, the speaker articulates his own first-hand experience of a thing with authority and against the backdrop of poetic traditions of figurative language: “Autumn is the traditional metaphor for dying —/ winter is death; spring, rebirth/ Not so in the desert…” But the poem ultimately moves through the vulnerability of being without the loved addressee and into a kind of gratitude for the healing we find in forming new connections.
It is Kerl’s capacity to render healing and transformation with beauty and attainability that makes Brevity especially useful to the contemporary reader. The autobiographical details Kerl shares are entirely his own, but there is an immense sharing of hope that runs throughout the book. Carried by Kerl’s talent with poetic craft, this hope resonates long after reading.