Reading Kathleen Rooney's "Where Are the Snows" is much like walking into an echo chamber from which you emerge enlightened, amused and shaken. In each poem, sounds, ideas and positions rise, repeat and mutate, as in this line from a poem on outer space: "Black hole as home for the Holy Ghost? Holey ghost. Wholly ghost."
Beckett-y puns and reflections finally merge and unify to show, elegantly, the complexity of the common idea they are addressing. Many of the poems explore single concepts, like light, or the moon, or demons, through a series of inspiringly bold statements and observations that bounce off each other and propel themselves forward in ways that can be, at the book's highest moments, freeing.
Rooney seems to be by turns confiding in the reader, delivering an engaging lecture and performing a rangy monologue in which each new prose stanza and, subsequently, each poem, becomes part of a composite portrait of a life spent in intense awareness, as if dispensed by someone pacing on a stage and stopping regularly to launch a brilliant statement into the darkness.
