A REVIEW OF MY CHAPBOOK NEW YEAR BEGUN: SELECTED POEMS (2022) by KYLA HOUBOLT

New Year Begun, Chapbook of Selected Poems by Jon Cone, CCCP Chapbooks, https://cccpchapbooks.bigcartel.com/ One of the main pleasures in Jon Cone’s poetry (New Year Begun, Selected Poems, CCCP Chapbooks) is that, while many of the images are surprising, even shocking, and often dark, they do not startle. They are instead given a container that presents them like glowing jewels to be admired, or better, absorbed. It’s as though Cone does not need to grab attention with his use of dark imaginings or dark realities, but is simply including them, in an almost matter of fact way, because they are facets of experience we all share. In ‘A Winter’s Tale of River and Bridge’ a man has moved to a town, a very ordinary, quiet sounding place, and as he goes out looking for work on a winter day, he happens to see what might be a body in the river he crosses. There is, of course, nothing he can do, and no drama is involved in the telling of this, simply a clear and musical evocation of bitter cold, and what might happen as one walks to town. Or take ‘Names That Could Not Possibly Be Known’: “Time is a dust-lake where memory sinks like a sullen beast deep into the darkest corner” What is implied repeatedly in these poems is the sense that there are depths of experience each of us has which can never fully be known, only glimpsed or partially revealed by careful language – language that is careful not to say too much nor to try to explain. Language that simply relies upon our sense of recognition arising from a place where we also fail to be able fully to express all that is there but which we know so well. It’s almost comforting to have these encounters with a severed hand, or with a body in a freezing river, – the comfort of the way “tall boots lean against tall boots”, mutely. The poems included here range from very short, two or three line pieces, to the fourteen page final piece, ‘The Legible Notebook Entries of William “The Selanate” Runecoke’. This consists mostly of a series of tiny, diary-like and haiku-like snippets: ‘5 Spring– a crazy gone world – my shadow on wet ground’ or ‘14 Her trembling dog– the old socialist grandmother tends to radical turnips’ One longer segment is a tender message of the diarist Runecoke to his wife which includes the enigmatic and consoling phrase, “Our responsibility is to give solace back to the quiet”. I could even suggest that it’s a deep sense of quiet that pervades these pieces, even in the pieces that stand out for their lighter qualities, such as “The Omega Intersection” with its “twelve suns of Gorlax” or “Numbers” and its several “radiances”. A matter-of-factness that conveys the sense that, yes, we all know such follies, such evils, such absurd and dark encounters, and the poet is merely presenting a selection of these to be witnessed. I come away from these poems feeling a kind of warmth toward my human family, a quality of acceptance that approaches grace. I also come away with an appreciation for the skill of this poet in offering these reflections in a manner that reaches deep into a recognition of our shared human territory. This is a collection that gives “solace back to the quiet.”