Written by the engaging host of the popular show, Poetry Unbound, the poems of Kitchen Hymns are finely honed melodies of survival--shaped with both humor and anger, force and conviction.
Pádraig Ó Tuama's
Kitchen Hymns opens with a question: Do You Believe in God? -- but the bee, gone extinct, cannot answer, and the grass calls believe a poor verb. This collection trades belief for language, and philosophy is grounded in form and narrative.
Kitchen Hymns is structured like a ghost mass, where even if God is a favorite emptiness, longing still has things to say: Jesus and Persephone meet at Hell's exit and discuss survival; someone believes more in birds than belief; hares carry messages from the overworld to the underworld. A study in lyric address,
Kitchen Hymns speaks to a shifting you an unknown you; the strange you; a lover, a hated other; the you of erotic desire; the you of creation and destruction. Large themes are informed by and contained in a poetics of observation, humor, trauma, dialogics, lament, rage and praise. Delivered in finely honed melodies, shaped with force and conviction, Kitchen Hymns reckon[s] with the empty, and becomes busy with a body / not a question.
