Kevin’s pocket book—Another Day—is in three parts: Elsewhere, Everything is Evening, and Final Days. You also get a prologue and an epilogue, in total, 38 poems. What great value; maybe the best ten dollars you’ll ever spend.

Reading through this collection, I found many poems I wished I’d made myself. Some poems possess a coiled intensity, and they catch you up in their unwinding. Others are more contemplative, and invite you into a sense of the ineffable that lies beneath the surface of the everyday. This a book of powerful poems.

It’s a place populated by the kind of poem that the poet Gregory Orr suggests—in his Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry—constellates around a moment, a place, a person or a feeling, as distinct from the narrative poem which takes you on a journey, which builds from beginning to end. As Orr says, the lyric poem has more in common with the sculptor carving away stone to reveal the figure within.

Recently I came across the 1932 film, Farewell to Arms, based on Hemingway’s novel of the same name. The male lead is Gary Cooper, and it struck me while watching Cooper, that Kevin often writes like Cooper acts. It was said of Cooper that he kept his acting spare, seemed at times to be overly restrained. But—as the story goes—when the rushes were played at the end of the day, it would be clear that Cooper’s pitch was perfect.

Here are the final ten lines of the beautiful and tender poem, ‘Living the Dharma’. It’s centred on the beloved who loses her hair after a course of chemotherapy—

Suddenly, you’re

a boy monk living the Dharma,

half removed from the world

of things, untouched by all that ruins us all, and you

seem far from me

as the nearest star. I take your hand

that you won’t drift

away. The sun strikes your skull. It gleams

like clay as you cast your hair over the garden.

The birds will build a nest with it

you say to the brittle air, to the sky.

I could draw your attention to many more poems in this little book that astonish. Reading these poems has inspired me to work harder at my own craft, and especially, to know when less is more, and when it’s not.

– Steve Armstrong