Whole Sky

That Kircher’s poems are private ones constitutes the strength and disadvantage of her first collection. The book reads like miniature portraits of the interiors of a life: what happens to us in rooms, before sleeping or in the quiet of an empty house. While sometimes too private, not speaking beyond the argument between lovers or the grandmother’s death, her skillful images weave quotidian scenes into subtle and disturbing landscapes. These poems hover between dream and wakefulness, as when the girl in Dreamer’s Dark sings to the fish she won’t eat whose eye is wrinkled like an ocean wave / so everyone it sees is swept away. Although certain moments remain estranged to the reader, the cobblestones and hillsides, the self’s familiar body become the reader’s stunning, if not quiet, possession. In the end, we believe that the mouse caught in the kitchen trap is, as the poem asserts, desperate and angelic.

–Michael Ryan