Kevin Graham’s ‘First Impressions’
“Running through time’s passage will be all the rooms of light you meant to experience”
In this exceptional pamphlet, Graham writes formally of the deep heartbreak and soul-ache of grief. A poet of great emotional depth and skill, the echoes of grief resonate throughout the collection in a multitude of forms — “THERE, THERE” perhaps being the poem that demonstrates the thematic thread the most clearly to me.
Woven also with themes of the natural world, the elements, he invites us to find solace and joy in them:
“There are many things to buoy us,
Like the elm trees in moonlight
And the dew on the grass.”
while equally reminding us of our place within nature, its transience and ours, the clock that is always moving forward while our time comes to a halt, our frailty, vulnerability and mortality while we look up at the stars and out to sea.
It is a book about memory and the struggle that all those who have lost grapple with. We cling to fragments, images, feelings of the past while also praying for amnesia to erase the pain:
“Lord, keep my memory clean.”
“To open like a book in a field of memory where a crow splits, doubling with its shadow flying high and low
at the same time.”
The poems also read as intimate, sometimes slightly ironic, letters to love and hope. They are balanced in their reflection of life and death and it is done seamlessly and with extraordinary beauty.
First Impressions is a pamphlet in which each exquisitely crafted poem is “a room of light” through which the reader travels with Graham while also, undoubtedly, recalling their own personal experiences of grief and love. It is a journey like an “irresistible song” pulling us towards those we love and carry with us even when they’re gone.
You can find Kevin Graham’s pamphlet here:
