Tom Dvorske, Cimarron Review, Fall 2002
Kathleen McGookey's first book, Whatever Shines, leaves one with the feeling of a gradual lift-off, then a settling in as the plane levels and the flood of subconscious memories, fears, and joys that flickered during the ascent begin to take on the deep, reflective light of the sky at 30,000 feet. The images that form include swans and a blue heron, dogs, one's grandmother, and that peculiar aunt who never married. And speaking of marriage, weddings, and the accoutrement of commitment, we can't help but wonder what might have been and how it balances with what is. As these poems and prose poems repeatedly tell us, "Once an idea takes hold, the heart isn't satisfied" ("Leaving Logansport").
Whether writing in prose or verse, McGookey manages a sensitivity and energy that encloses the reader in the clear light of what is being said, and what she says constantly balances the desire to confess with near revulsion at the tendency to confess. Take the prose poem "Reticence," for example:
But there is more to what I'm saying than complaint. Why can't you just change the names or the situation? Such as, a yellow bird flew into my window yesterday, then hopped away, dazed, and sat on the deck a long time. How did the air turn to glass with no warning? Bird against glass upsets me. I'd rather have the pure and distilled emotion, if possible....
In McGookey's poems, pure and distilled emotion is never confused with the factual details of a situation; rather, emotion rides on the complex of images that pervade an experience and the memory of that experience so that the telling is never vacant reportage. Memory comes with its share of allusiveness that tells us something about the tradition in which McGookey writes:
Esther rides her blue bicycle around the lake,
and their daughter smiles behind her stringer of
eight trout,behind a certain slant of light, the lake's calm eye.
They will remember the light, how they bathe in it,
always the light and the lake. Never mind the soul's
weight in water,
what water does to the soul. A slow and sure exita great calm space. ("Labor Day")
If, for Dickinson, this "certain slant of light" is what oppresses, for McGookey, it is also what "shines."
Other allusions in McGookey's poems occur with the surprise and inevitability of her imaginative associations. In the prose poem, "Another Question of Travel:' she juxtaposes marriage and travel and, with the title and opening lines, respectively, calls up both Elizabeth Bishop and grandmother Esther: "We think we own the lake by walking its circumference, pointing to our rented lot - there." McGookey asks Bishop's question, "but why travel? The landscape of the heart stays the same:" and shortly follows this by opening the book's third, and final, section with Marianne Moore's question from her poem, "Marriage": "What can one do with it?"
While in these poems moments of relative peace might lead to recollection and speculation, they never lose the "heft" of which Dickinson writes. McGookey reminds us that potentially all choices bring a "terrifying regularity," and that wisdom lies in recognizing that "Everything can be a lesson, a way to live, though there are consequences." Whatever Shines lifts us to the valuable space of contemplating a way to live, and upon landing, we find it has equipped us with the strength to embrace the consequences.