House of Blue Light

The House of Blue Light is the second collection of autobiographical ""memory poems"" by Catholic-school-boy-gone-bad-turned-poet-made-good David Kirby, a stand-up comic of verse if ever there was one: ""in Stardust Memories . . . these wise space aliens who visit Earth . . . tell [Woody Allen] that if he really wants to serve humanity, / he should tell funnier jokes, wait, that's my duty, / I think, that's my public duty! Because sooner or later, / we all turn upside down.""Wearing both heart and wit on his sleeve, Kirby confides in longish narrative poems events he actually or vicariously experienced, as a child, a teen, a young man, and now, as well as some future scenes he imagines. Literary theorists Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes; Little Richard and Muhammad Ali; Herman Melville, James Dickey, and Henry James; friends, family, personal heroes, and acquaintances, including the Ah Oui Girl of Paris and Tige Watley's Whoah of Baton Rouge, are all equally alive in Kirby's poems.As Walt Whitman did, Kirby offers a first-person speaker as a proxy for everyone else (""Who, including ourselves, / knows what we know and when we know it?""), achieving a unity and accessible authenticity rare in poetry. A fun house, ""a mishmash for sure,"" The House of Blue Light is a delightfully entertaining, irreverent, erudite collection of commentary piling upon commentary that brings us ""that one element so largely absent / from our quotidian existence, i.e., surprise.