Viper Rum: Poetry

Download In her newest book Viper Rum Mary Karr confronts the storm that is coming––dark like the body, death itself––with the poet’s knowledge of the soul which is (as she understands it) the poet’s grand manufacture, a ‘fiery mist’-light reflected from a far source, and yet more inward to us than ’the broad rivers of the heart.’ Like Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney she intends poetry of the plain style and the truth of the unmistakably situated self, but is taught also, by desire (as they are not), to expect that among the deliquescent ruins of the final body there will be found, as she says, ‘illumined, my soul at last uncaged from ribs, rising.’

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