Saturday Review: “Help From Unexpected Quarters” a review of Kathryn Kirkpatrick’s poetry collection The Fisher Queen: New and Selected Poems (2019) by Catherine Carter in NCLR Online Spring 2024
Even Professor Carter needs a reminder of the legendary adventures referenced by the Fisher King. She reminds the reader of the King’s central question, “What ails you, sir?” and establishes the purpose of Kirkpatrick’s, “The question is central to our era of climate change, sea level rise, and species loss, in a land well on its way to being as barren as the Fisher King’s.”
Carter writes, “One of the most remarkable aspects of this New and Selected is how seamlessly the question “What ails you?” and a woman poet’s many responses to it unite selections from six prior collections, weaving them into a more beautifully coherent whole than most of us can claim for a body of work that spans decades. The volume feels as though most of its contents have all been tending toward the same place, the barren land, and the as-yet-unasked question.”
Carter illumes which poems are new and which are from prior collections and how Kirkpatrick’s “eco-feminism” shapes her work. She writes, “Readers learn that, “Finding the Grail is learning / another beauty from a changing land that speaks. / Why not fathom the language of earthworms, / sing notes of jasmine, chant rhythms of light.” The poem ends on the question the Fisher Queen now asks of the reader and the world: “What is it, friend, that ails you?”
Read the entire review in the Online Spring 2024 issue out now! And order the book from Bookshop.org.
