Holding Things Together

Medicine for the Soul - You will want to savor each of these magical poems

In Chuck O'Neil’s fresh new collection, so many of the poems illustrate and illuminate his volume’s title, for holding things together is precisely (in the many meanings of the phrase) what these keenly reflective homages to locality, to family, to continuity, to place and to history do. Clarity of language, generosity of feeling, rhythmic delicacy: in their fluidly unpunctuated stanzas the poems are as well-hewn, shaped, and planed as a piece of precious wood (‘scaling lengths minding alignments’). The local is O'Neil’s landscape, whether in lovingly unsentimental poems for his wife and family, for his town past and present, or for his natural surroundings. It is a celebration, too, of work-manual, thoughtful, emotionally-aware work-including the work of poem-making itself, out of which he has composed this garland of gifts for the rest of us, holding all together. - Eamon Grennan