House of Blue Light

The House of Blue Light is the second collection of autobiographical ""memory poems"" by Catholic-school-boy-gone-bad-turned-poet-made-good David Kirby, a stand-up comic of verse if ever there was one: ""in Stardust Memories . . . these wise space aliens who visit Earth . . . tell [Woody Allen] that if he really wants to serve humanity, / he should tell funnier jokes, wait, that's my duty, / I think, that's my public duty! Because sooner or later, / we all turn upside down.""

Wearing both heart and wit on his sleeve, Kirby confides in longish narrative poems events he actually or vicariously experienced, as a child, a teen, a young man, and now, as well as some future scenes he imagines. Literary theorists Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes; Little Richard and Muhammad Ali; Herman Melville, James Dickey, and Henry James; friends, family, personal heroes, and acquaintances, including the Ah Oui Girl of Paris and Tige Watley's Whoah of Baton Rouge, are all equally alive in Kirby's poems.

As Walt Whitman did, Kirby offers a first-person speaker as a proxy for everyone else (""Who, including ourselves, / knows what we know and when we know it?""), achieving a unity and accessible authenticity rare in poetry. A fun house, ""a mishmash for sure,"" The House of Blue Light is a delightfully entertaining, irreverent, erudite collection of commentary piling upon commentary that brings us ""that one element so largely absent / from our quotidian existence, i.e., surprise.

David Kirby, the W. Guy McKenzie Professor of English at Florida State University, is the author of numerous books, including four previous poetry collections, most recently My Twentieth Century and Big-Leg Music. He has contributed poems and essays to such journals as Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Gettysburg Review and is included in Best American Poetry 2000, edited by Rita Dove. He is married to the poet Barbara Hamby and lives in Tallahassee.