Washington, DC, June 13, 2023 –(
CarryOnHarry.com)– As Grace Cavalier notes, “Tom Kirlin shapes the filaments of experience into language: romantic, mystical, spiritual, magical— intense poems written with the skill and accuracy of an expert. When we read a book, newly written, nothing like it exists – and this means it’s alive with possibilities. This book comes fully alive,” thanks, in part, to Cavalier’s own visual art. Grace is a painter as well as Maryland’s state poet laureate. She generously contributes ten of her finest acrylics that shift mood as subtly as Kirlin’s emotions as he insightfully answers his second wife’s query: “What good/ is flesh/for crying?” Cavalier notes: “From the personal to the universal, Kirlin’s philosophies speak of the natural mysteries we live with, and how these can be reached with poetry. In the title poem, we hear a lament, a prophesy, a call—to and for our humanness. Poetry redeems and transforms this into a crystalline reality. That’s the secret of writing. That’s Kirlin’s prize: ‘a sudden single singing lark/ struggling to gather light/ across the mind’s flash-frozen fields.’”
Tom Kirlin has won the Larry Neal Award for Poetry, a grant from the District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for post-doctoral studies at Yale University. Kirlin also taught briefly at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before moving to Washington, D.C., where he worked for several decades on energy, environment, science and technology policy issues. He participated as an NGO in UN climate negotiations that led to the Kyoto Protocols. He later served as Vice President of the Center for the Study of the Presidency and there helped edit a non-partisan Triumphs and Tragedies of the Modern Presidency: Seventy-Six Case Studies in Presidential Leadership.
“AFTER THE EYE HAS EATEN” includes art by Grace Cavalieri, Poet Laureate of Maryland and host of the long- standing, Library-of-Congress program, “The Poet and The Poem.”
From the bloody halls of Paris to the mystery of an unborn child, Kirlin is a keen observer of life’s tragedies and ambiguities. But in the end, his moral courage and certainty lift us up, and make poetry, once again, worthwhile.
Poets’ Choice is honored to have him among our stable of fine American spirits.
