Bone Silence [Paperback]

Mood, that's what Peycho Kanev writes. The poet taps out poetry that is colorless, smoky; images such as "Empty Space", a poem that leaves the reader "in an empty bed/ with the swirling smoke/ and the burnt desire." Pecyho's poetry has soul, the kind of soul that's only found in the atmosphere of old black and white movies.

A collection of poetry should not be a jumble of stanzas and haphazard, leap frogging images. A collection should contain moving images and motifs instead of plots and a story; things more than the book's binding and glue that keep it together. Time, for Peycho's narrator, as in the same for Keats, is always against the poet. There's immediacy, an urgency shared by all artists, it's the anxiety of artists: Time. "While Shaving" and "Metronome" are excellent poems that convey this worried hurry.

Writers write about writing; sometimes their characters and narrators write about writing, too. Peycho Kanev's Bone Silence stands alongside James Joyce, Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov, and Charles Bukowski, all who were writes that wrote about writing. This style has a side effect that is rare for readers. It causes the reader not to break any reading taboos about blurring the writer and the narrator. Additionally it's enjoyable to read about a writer finding the right words. Writers know what to do when the words come, but waiting is a beast that is never tamed, as seen in "Passage" and "Status Quo". In these poems, poetry is the focus of the poetry. In "Easy Afternoon" God is poetry and poetry is God, but in the presence of the almighty, the reader counts the limited commodity of life and treasures the experience in its seasons of stagnation and weird, quirky conversations.

Peycho's voice is the voice of an internationalist ("living in three continents") that has been warped by seeing what every college graduate is told to see--the world. The atmosphere, the mood, of the book says that the world is much smaller than any map or desk top globe lets on. It's so small, in fact, that the human imagination hasn't the elbow room for its art. But the imagination much like the human it resides in can make a habitat of any environment.

The poems in Bone Silence reflect a small world. But it's not paranoia out to get the reader; when all the lights are out and something soft and classical is playing like in "Sitting in Wolf's Apartment" or "Some Poetry"; as a candle dances shadows behind the furniture, that's where Bone Silence is, shifting, between light and dark. Buy this book of visions. Buy Bone Silence. Read Bone Silence then put it on your shelf, but you won't forget it.

Bone Silence, by Peycho Kanev, is a constant reminder to us all that poetry usurps reality. Kanev takes readers in many directions, constantly returning the reader to the familiar. The various themes and symbolic repetitions of the works create a narrative larger than the individual pieces. Kanev draws us into his worlds, leaving us there to experience the familiarity of his voice, which seems to become our own. "Bone Silence" belongs in any serious collection of modern poetry today.

Glenn Lyvers
Poetry Quarterly Inc.
(A not-for-profit literary magazine)