A Bouquet Brought Back from Space
In a secularized society, what kind of faith in our collective powers and imaginations can be patch-worked together, and what might be the role of angels? Through multiple locales, languages, and spiritualities, A Bouquet Brought Back from Space both subverts and sublimates traditions of religious poetry, love poetry, and song.
Playful in form and formed full of play, this fourth book of poetry by Kevin Spenst explores loss, love and faith through the palindrome, Madlib, Fibonacci, found poem, prose poem, sonnet and various strains of free verse. Spenst meditates on mental health, poetic friendships and influences, and the possibility of there being an angel assigned to the Mennonites at the beginning of their global journey.
These poems sing, cry, and soothe.
VIDEO: Sweetheart Wings Path Music in Space
“The weather in Kevin Spenst’s A Bouquet Brought Back from Space is fantastical: Alternate rains of teeth and pocket-knives from boxcar clouds clear the skies over an emergency-blanket morning. We are presented with a wide-angle vista; and in it a family in four generations, acclimating to a new country and the griefs that mental illness can bring. The journey leads us to a reliquary of insight, which the author guides us to with keen search beams, humour, and candor. We never lose sight of that steady and cognizant avatar of the humanity they are gesturing toward: our fellow travelers. This collection is an encyclopedia of the modern human condition; its viewpoint zooming and panning in high resolution, through reentry, from the vastness of space.”
—Tolu Oloruntoba author of Each One a Furnace.
“A rare collection of poems that explore the very DNA of Spenst’s lifelong ecstatic quest.”
—Betsy Warland author of Breathing the Page
REVIEWS
by P.W. Bridgman for periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics
APRIL 6, 2024
A Bouquet Brought Back from Space is Kevin Spenst’s fourth book of poems. In many respects, it is his most ambitious and fully realised collection to date. Those astute enough in their literary tastes to have read this prolific poet’s three predecessor collections (and his 16 chapbooks) will recognise some familiar themes in Bouquet. They will also discern a broadening and deepening in the sophistication of Spenst’s unique poetic voice.
As was the case in his previous works, the spectre of mental illness casts a long shadow across the poems in this new collection. Spenst makes no secret of the fact that his father suffered from an intractable schizophrenia. He was in and out of hospital repeatedly over several decades which overlapped with the poet’s childhood and young adulthood, forcing the young Spenst constantly to seek “distraction from [his] father’s/ mind as he jettisoned jobs, crankcases, tools, and fortnights of sleep”. Yet, for all that, and despite the resulting trauma that subsists into the present, Spenst declares that his father was the “one man/ he loved most”.
It occurred
under the radiation
of the moon,
that the boy could never
trust his fellow
man ever since the one man
he loved most
had gone lunar…
[From “The Moon’s Woodcutter Beholds”]
The imprint of troubled childhood experiences is everywhere to be seen in Spenst’s present worldview and sensibilities; it emerges repeatedly in poems that carefully dissect and lay bare the consequences of growing up alongside mental illness within the family. As one would expect from this poet, though, the subject is treated with, by turns, bone-chilling starkness, respectful humour and a deep tenderness. An example of the latter is found in “Kneeling by the Side of the Bed, He Taught Me to Pray”:
… I wish I could go back with what I know
now and work on the mechanics of our awk-
wardness, to stop mid-prayer and tell my dad
he wasn’t a sin-wrecked failure… just different.
VIDEO: Bedchamber Kingdoms (sung maybe in F)
Artwork by Shannon Pawliw