Too Much Happens
(A review by Susan Griffin) Today, I am turning to Kathleen Weaver’s extraordinary book of poetry, her first, Too Much Happens. A title that reflects my feelings on the day after the massive terrorist attacks in Paris. These are elegantly spare poems, radiant, piercingly insightful, and somewhat rare today for this kind of poetics, moving. The first poem in the book is one I will read no doubt many times this week. I am hanging, now, on to the skirt or the shroud or the flag of language, not so much for meanings as for communion. Called “The Known World” this poem begins, “there is so much I want to tell you.” That urgency of speech, a longing to express above all what cannot be explained, nailed down, reduced to data. But the lines are specific: “an exceptional despair moves over the known world/ a cratered marketplace.” And her perception is undaunting, “A scene remains as the camera turns away.” (Kathleen Weaver. Too Much Happens. Post Apollo Press. 2015)