Introduction

Finally a book by Greg Keith.

I've been looking forward to this volume since 1990, when I heard Greg's poems at several readings and asked him to show me a collection of his work. The manuscript he gave me was a revelation. Greg seemed to me one of the most original poets writing in English, someone truly on the "cutting edge," with one foot in the Western poetic tradition, and the other in the technology of the next millennium--a sort of fusion of what our civilization was bringing from the past into an already partially defined future.

I'm happy to say that the qualities which so pleasantly startled me in 1990 are abundantly in evidence in this, Greg's first full-length book, and I'm delighted to have the opportunity to talk about them here.

Greg's poems are by turns witty, ruminative, elegiac, and lyrical. His subjects are our common everyday experiences told in a highly evocative, tautly controlled vernacular that William Carlos Williams would have admired: with the first line of almost every piece, Greg demonstrates that rare talent--I call it the writer's only unlearnable gift--to instantly transport the reader to the dramatic scene that he is, usually, speaking from. The voice that conveys that immediacy may be an exquisitely modulated rendering of speech, but it is also among the most original voices I've ever encountered on the page.

That voice--whether wry or ecstatic; whether it is celebrating, meditating, or grieving--uses a vocabulary that expresses a unique sensibility. As he reveals in "Seventh Grade Science," Greg has been obsessed with science and technology since childhood. He therefore not only thinks about and sees the world in terms of the sciences, but he uses the words of science in his everyday speech. That vocabulary, which so richly expresses his scientifically oriented sensibility, is what makes his work unique.

The importance of this aspect of Greg's work cannot be stressed enough, since we conceive of the world through the words we use, and over time the words of a culture, of which the poetic tradition is a part, become shopworn and, by definition, promote shopworn ways of seeing and responding to things. One of the poet's tasks, therefore, is to reinvigorate language and thereby revitalize our perceptions, a task which Greg almost offhandedly fulfills.

Essentially, Greg is a love poet, but to see the unique way he approaches this most familiar of poetic sub-genres, all the reader need do is peruse "An Ethological View of the Love Song," in which Greg's witty vision emerges not from the metaphors of Petrarch but from the textbooks of Zoology and the handbooks of computer programming. Understand that when I say "witty," I mean the kind of wit found in the poems of John Donne, a poet Greg has reminded me of from the start. Greg's meditations and love lyrics, presented in his scientific language are twenty-first century versions of Donne's wildly imaginative love poems and meditations. So are Greg's depth of thought and feeling.

In some poems, Greg's meditations incorporate astronomy ("The Age of Light"), in others biology and physics ("Wear and Tear," "You," "Selvedges," "I, Declared"), in yet others history and politics ("Off the Wall in Washington, D.C.," "Free Speech"). I don't want to leave the impression, however, that Greg's main poetic strength is his vocabulary. On the contrary: As I said before, all his poems are personal and immediate; his is a most human voice speaking to the reader's heart as well as head, and in such poems as "The Roots of the Pathetic Fallacy," Greg shows how movingly he can write without using a single syllable of scientific jargon.

Greg's range of subject matter takes in the entire human spectrum. His meditations on love, politics, loneliness, death, and, yes, the meaning of life, are the stuff that brings us back to well springs of our humanity, and will do the same for future generations, when the blips and bleeps of technology, it seems, will punctuate every moment of life. Then Greg's poems will not only recall to those generations what it was like to live in this time and place, but will accompany them through their days like the words of a wise, witty guide gently sharing with them the eternal verities of the human condition.