Kathryn Kirkpatrick. The Body’s Horizon.
Chapel Hill, NC: Signal Books, 1996. 84 pp.

In The Body’s Horizon, Kathryn Kirkpatrick speaks from a feminist perspective shaped by meaningful bonds with men—such as brother, lover, or father—through which she senses her equality of talent, significance, and power. In these beautiful poems, the discovery of personal autonomy offers compensation for the losses and limitations that define any life. The first poem in the collection, “For My Father, Who Never Sang,” establishes these themes. In it, the poet stands behind a man at the check-out line at the grocery store who has selected more items than he can afford and therefore must choose which ones to set aside. The clerk “is waiting / as the man decides to keep his Sara Lee crème-filled sandwiches … .” As the poet watches the man choosing which things to do without, she is reminded of her father, who also did without and whose talent as a singer went unfulfilled. The poem concludes:

As these lines suggest, exploring the possibilities for choice, dignity, and self-definition amid “what remains” becomes a major project of the book.

The collection is divided into four parts arranged roughly chronologically, each part bearing the title of one of the poems in it: “The Daughter,” “Keeping the Feast,” “Window on Spain,” and “Living Together.” “The Daughter” includes several poems that address or refer to the poet’s late father. Poems in “Window on Spain” often use the poet-traveler’s interaction with or observation of a stranger to lead to an insight or moment of lyric beauty.

In “Keeping the Feast,” several of the poems have the speaker imaginatively identifying with a powerful woman from mythic literature whose story is bound up with that of a man. “The Seventh Day of Creation,” for example, addresses the Eve of Escher’s woodcut: “Eve, I have watched you long enough / to lean against the trunk of that black tree myself.” In another poem, Britomart from The Fairie Queene writes a letter to her father, and in “Reliving the Myths,” the poet imagines herself a Calypso to her lover’s Odysseus, compensating for his detachment through a recognition of her power as a woman: “You always have this: / how no one will need / to bind you / when the Sirens sing / because you know / the song / already so well, / could sing it / yourself if you wanted.” In these lines, the woman’s autonomy emerges three ways: in being able to resist a spell that men cannot, in being able to produce that spell herself, and in being able to decide not to use it. Here, as in all of The Body’s Horizon, Kathryn Kirkpatrick demonstrates a talent for the lyric that deserves our attention.

Barbara Mortimer