Like Buddha-Calm Bird

Kevin Raba's new collection of poems and stories, Like Buddha-Calm Bird, improves on and riffs off the variable rhythms of the stories we create, revise, and live. Writing the music inherent in changing narratives of the ordinary and extraordinary, Rabas illustrates what a fellow Kansas poet meant when he said, "Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business, anyone who is alive is caught up in the imminences, the doubts mixed with the triumphant certainty, of poetry." Whether writing about Ugandan rain, the Bossa Nova, a middle school drummer, or the T. Rex at a museum, Rabas puts his ear to what wants to be said, then moseys into words slow and deliberate, or explodes into language fast and on the wing. In a sense, much of this collection leads up to the final section, "Eclipse," showing us how we partner with the life force to co-create this world: "the breath of God/comes in a cloud" and "an open/mouth whistles/over and past tall grasses/ from dust, remakes the world." Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Kansas Poet Laureate 2009-13, and author of Everyday Magic: Fieldnotes on the Mundane and Miraculous.