Kimberly Campanello, An Interesting Detail

 

The Language

The books don’t know what’s inside their covers, or they don’t care. Just when you learned what was happening, what direction to face, how to move and what to carry where, the language changed. You were reassured it was all still working and the transformation would be total, just as before. We could just as easily go to the top of the dune and play with roots in the sand. We could even kneel down and twist them around our hands and wrists to hold ourselves down. As I understand it, the heart can be seen to beat if you can get a glow to show up properly around it. Any background will do.

The latest poetry title by Irish-American poet Kimberly Campanello, currently a Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds, is An Interesting Detail (Bloomsbury, 2025), an expansive collection of sequences, prose poems and stand-alone lyrics that extend a sheen of surrealism grounded in concrete moments. “The family walk the sandbar for sand dollars,” the poem “Family Walk” begins, “slip them between toes, foot to hand, and bucket them. The dollars dry to death on the condo patio. The family walk to the cave paintings. They find a wild horse in a sinkhole just before it dries to death at the level of their knees.” I describe the poems within as expansive, but at less than seventy pages of poems, this collection is compact, thick as stone and incredibly sharp. “begins with shouting / in sleep I am naked / on the carpet in a power stance,” opens the poem “Moving Nowhere Here,” “sensing an army nearby / I am charging the ghost / hanging on the back of the door [.]” Campanello’s poems begin with small objects or moments, offering descriptions that expand into larger ripples of narrative, akin to surreal kinds of field notes.

Much of the collection is constructed via the prose poem, each of which extend out their narratives, both echo and counterpoint to her more traditional lyrics, built of accumulated, almost stand-alone phrases and sentences. Two sides of the same poetic, one might say, the line-breaks articulating further spaces between phrases and thought, although not always where one might immediately think. “One remarkable item,” the prose poem “Receipt” begins, “found with a man buried near where I used to live, turned out to be a whistle made from a carved and highly polished human thigh bone. Dating suggests it belonged to someone who lived around the same time as him. To bring you up to speed on this, I’m certain they could squeeze me in here among the greats. It’s what I want. It’s important to let people know your wishes in advance.” Through Campanello, her surrealism is held with an anchor to the real, allowing elements of truth to shimmer across the skin of her narratives. As the poem “Use Value” begins: “If I had studied / STEM things might / have been different. / If I had fed / into the meeting / there would have / been an outcome. / The tin whistle / is a passion of mine. / Aren’t I lucky / to do what I’m / passionate about?” Her details are moments, and her moments are vast.

They Didn’t Expect 

hedges steeples the time it takes
to cut away the chutes purpling
lips down the promenade past
nations stepping forward fire
blocking fire important speech
looped in a darkened room
hardy sightseers in rainproof
jackets everlasting bunkers
farmers or farmers wives or
farmers children blown
up mundane tasks running
commentary along the bottom
of the tapestry build up
of bodies where do we go
when we die the lovers
eating their crêpes her
outrageously classy flowers
their rolling cigarettes like sex