Kyle Harvey : Cosmographies

It's always been the matter with poetry

posing the question       asking the answer

putting the next      opener and shaper

Kyle Harvey lets those hidden corners show

a flash in the dense      a wink to a world

dancing substances       moving poems   

— Clark Coolidge

Kyle Harvey’s Cosmographies is a fearless book. In the eponymous opening section he really does take on the origins of time and space, mind and language; he then goes on in “The Alphabet That Never Recovers” to channel early humans’ experiences of language, thought, and spirituality; and finally in “Western Suites,” gets personal, if you can say that such free-swinging and wide open language is ever exactly personal in any usual sense. poems/go, taking/with them only/what we let go of./Whole oceans of meaning/revealed./ Don’t ask me/what I mean/Don’t tell me/what you mean./ Meaning/is the murder/ of process. Indeed! 

 — Norman Fischer

A humility born of contemplation of the cosmos underwrites the poems of Kyle Harvey’s Cosmographies, radiating outward from the poet’s I to the furthest reaches of the universe. Literary time falls away and history too and place as only local, and one is where one is, which is here, in geological space/time, Denver Nuggets notwithstanding. It would almost be prayer if it weren’t too much poem. The visionary still puts in the work, weighing and measuring his materials with a careful hand. A mountain Mallarmé withdrawing volumes from adjacent book cliffs, Harvey has built a refuge from the transactional chaos of an illyrical world, a cool place to inhabit. 

 — Garrett Caples

PAPERBACK. 100 pages.
ISBN: 978-1-950055-11-1