Among the Living. By JF Connolly. Syracuse, NY: The Comstock Review, 2006. $11.50 0-9747790-2-4

I received a copy of Connolly's chapbook in exchange for the entry fee for the Comstock Review's Jessie Bryce Niles poetry chapbook award. Reading between the lines should tell you that this means that I lost this contest, and as I've done before with other contests I've lost, I decided to review the winning book. (Read an interview here.)

It always makes me feel better when I lose to a superior manuscript, and placing behind Among the Living is no blow to my ego. Several of the poems deal with Connolly's upbringing in a funeral home. Issues of mortality, alcoholism, loss, abuse and the church all stand out on the page. The collection opens with "Last Summer" a haunting meditation on the reverberations of guilt throughout the life of a survivor of tragedy. The poem opens with a description of a tomcat eating a baby jay. In response, in a futile attempt, the mother jay attacks the bird: "Two days alter/the jay's mother signed the sky with screeches,/ calling in a god-awful sound—and then,/raiding the cat, flying down in attacks..." The poem goes on to describe, later in the summer, the aftermath of a shipwreck, in which three survivors (including the narrator's daughter) swim for shore: "She said kick, kick, and they prayed to God/until the cold, cold fluttering of death/took the boys away, down deep, her free hand/letting them go to the stone world/of fish..." The daughter becomes listless, overwhelmed by grief and guilt: "She grows thin, thinner./She is all water, and when evening comes,/she walks the beach and calls for them...throwing rocks until her arm aches,/calling their names, calling boy, boy..."

Many of these poems are narrative in form, pinning realizations of death and hopelessness down with telling historical events ranging from nuclear testing to graphic murders. It is difficult to describe the power of Connolly's imagery. These poems are charged with a rare intensity. What amazes me the most about them is the lack of fanfare. They are tight, controlled poems, wasting no language spelling out the implicit.

The final poem in the collection is one of my favorites: "Nightmare," which describes the search for bodies in the aftermath of a factory fire. As with several of these poems, it is full of striking imagery, such as: "An old woman reappears in the ruble...She has no eyes, no ears, no nose...She says mercy, murder, miracle./ A voice says your spleen is ruptured./ Through the smoke, I witness a false dawn, daybreak becoming/ calla lilies and coffins of bronze. I'm in the hearse,/ my hands searching, fumbling for a roll of clean white tape." The ending image is especially powerful, after all the horror, the blackness of soot and night described in the poem juxtaposes with "clean white tape" which he is fumbling for, trying to grasp. It is purity, it is simply something to help, and that's all any of us can really strive for – trying to help.