Title: A Few Words Will Do

Author: Lionel Kearns

Publisher: Talon Books

Pages: 128

Year Published: 2007

ISBN: 978-0-88922-558-9

$16.95 CDN/$16.95 US 

4 Stars 

Reviewed By: Kindah Mardam Bey 

The grotesque image on the front of Lionel Kearns first book of poetry, an old car with four dead cougars strapped to the hood was donated by Kearns to his publication from a family album and also ended up being a graphic poem for the reader to ruminate on. I must admit, the cover had me desirous to avoid reading this book of poetry from the onset, but you know what they say ‘never judge a book by its cover’ and so I plunged feet first.  

Kearns was born in the late 1930s and what his poetry encapsulates is not a ‘times better had’ or memories or even memoirs of a life pleasantly lived until extinguished by those damn baby boomers. No, what Kearns brings to the table is a deep understanding of himself, the words (few at times!) that he chooses to express that meaning of himself and a passing on of infinite wisdom. Don’t get me wrong, Kearns doesn’t preach, he explains the wonders (or sometimes lack of wonders) of life, with all its reflections, travels, understandings and most of all, stories render somewhere far away from nostalgia but close to home.  

An unusual book of poetry, A Few Words Will Do is a landscape of imagery and history that is held in both the palm of your hand and the swirling eclipse of time. Then again, poems like ‘Hockey is Zen’ takes on a much less deep meaning of oneself, but a marked realization of a societal enamourment. Some poems are visually stimulating like ‘The Birth Of God’ which is a binary code of the number one encapsulated in the number zero (think about it), or ‘Canadian Conversation’ which depicts two talking heads at each other made up of the letters ‘O’ and ‘N’ which can either spell ‘no’ or ‘on.’  

Kearns poetry reminds me of Altman’s films; something we all loved and connected to, but somehow found hard to easily pigeon-hole. A Few Words Will Do is a stunning debut collection of poems, which is a lifetimes worth in the making.