VA. WEST VA.:a review submitted to amazon
THE RIVER THAT TOUCHES THE TIMELESS
Science tells us that you can know light as a particle, or as a wave, but not know both at once. Similarly we can speak of Time as a river, the ever flowing stream of Isaac Watts' hymn that bears all its sons away, the duration of Henri Brgson's intuitive philosophy, or as moment's precious and without duration where the timeless and time intersect. Who but the poet or artist. and at that of a very specific sort, can join the everflowing and the timeless?
T. Byron Kelly's poetry and arts (for he has long worked also in painting and in music) are within a flow as this book shows by beginning with a brief anthology of works of those who came before., a greatgrandfather who was a preacher with the impulse to elevate language to express praise of God and to express his love for his wife, , a grandmother, and others including poetry of children and of Byron's sister Amy whose poetry breaks through into contemporary expression as. "secrets of the spirit/ sing in the wind/ listen very closely/... /your heart will mend."
It is a poetry as rooted in the hills as as Faulkner's :"where is any deathWhile in these blue hills slumbrous overheadI'm rooted like a tree? Though I be dead,This earth that holds me fast will find me breath."
But at the same time Byron in his poetry reaches for and attains a haiku honed sensibility which touches the durationless moment.
"I am windblown/ the raven knows/fly straight/ clover flow/ water root/ Poised between now and tomorrow/ a passage within us eternally or beginning...."
This reaching through experienced Time to the Eternal, giving voice to generations, to the hills themselves, joins of course the flow of poetry of the ages and of all times and cultures written, Dylan Thomas's words, " for the love of man and in Praise of God”.
-Bishop Seraphim Sigrist
January 27, 2018
