Beth Martinelli, Mid-American Review (Vol. 22, No. 2).
Kathleen McGookey's first book of poetry is luminous and fearlessly intelligent. The author has clearly mastered the prose poem, whether using it to tell a "Tale" of lovers or to tour a musical instrument factory in Brazil. Although Whatever Shines consists largely of prose poems, the poet also ventures confidently into verse. "The Moon in My Grandmother's Watch" is a graceful and evocative sestina; "One Night I Will Invent the Night" banters along in well-paced quatrains. In both her verse and prose poetry, McGookey writes with a steady hand; her poems brave the everyday with remarkable poise and imagination.
Within the romantic unrest and domestic mundanity of McGookey's world, a wonderland emerges. A street is not merely a street, but rather, "the street of shoemakers." The poet plunges briefly into fairytale, into a place separate from the poem's vague fish restaurant and its strangely materialistic moments, "money in the air." Surprisingly, McGookey expects the miraculous amidst the very routine she questions. In "Meteor," a young farm girl finds herself reborn in a meteor's brief light: her metamorphosis so great, "neighbors looked for her hidden wings." Throughout the book, McGookey searches for and gratefully discovers these singular moments of beauty.
Above all else, Whatever Shines chronicles an acute and unnamable longing, a wish to be other, to be elsewhere and the in-between-ness of "not wanting to go and then being gone nearly in the same breath." Polished with impeccable language, real craftsmanship and a gift for image, this first collection truly gleams.