POET

Richard Kenney (1948 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Richard Kenney's first book of poetry, The Evolution of the Flightless Bird, contains sonnets devoted to the narrator's recollections, observations, and studies of history. The first poem, "The Hours of the Day," alludes to the storyteller's convalescence after a severe neck injury. His holistic healing process is enhanced by a conscious reflection on his surroundings and the interpretation of various historical readings. The book's subsequent verse comments on an array of heroic figures, historical occurrences, and the author's adventures in Greece. A winning entry of the 1983 Yale Series of Younger Poets, the book was generally well received by critics and was praised for its originality. "Such poetry is not afraid of having intellect, or requiring it," asserted William Logan in the New York Times Book Review. "It was intellectually and spiritually ambitious," echoed Jay Parini in Nation, who then added, "Though Kenny's Flightless Bird remains one of the best first books of recent years, it does not prepare us for Orrery—a dazzling, book-length 'poem of the mind.'"

Orrery, Kenney's second book, uses verse to place the motions of earthly existence within their much larger universal realm. Named after a device invented in the eighteenth century to display the movements of the solar system, the work features some thirty sonnets devoted to physics, memory, and time. The book also includes a section comprised of more than sixty poems that follows the lives of several individuals on an apple cider farm and mill in present-day Vermont. This series discusses the events of these peoples' lives in a cyclical fashion—not chronologically over a several-year span, but grouped by season as planetary orbits change. Hailed by several critics for his fascinating presentation, Kenney was called "a poet with large ambitions" who has "the talent to fulfill them," by J. D. McClatchy in the New York Times Book Review. Parini also noted that the poems "interlock with breathtaking ingenuity," and concluded, "Kenney plucks the right chords, making Orrery the next best thing to a flawless performance."

CAREER

Writer; University of Washington, Seattle, assistant professor of English, 1989—.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Evolution of the Flightless Bird (poetry collection; includes "The Hours of the Day"), Yale University Press, 1984.
Orrery (poetry), Atheneum, 1985.
The Invention of the Zero, Knopf (New York), 1993.