What the Right Hand Knows

by Tom Healy

Healy's sensual, urgent debut collection moves from farmyard to cityscape as it depicts a teetering, asymmetric world. A speaker "deaf in one ear" ponders that "the Moon's dark side / has no sound"; a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1884800955
• ISBN13: 9781884800955
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: Four Way Books
• Length: 72 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.7" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

One of the best poetry books of the year!

Tom Healy's poetry is an elegiac voice worth knowing. A mixture of the Ancient Greeks, a more sparse, and urgent, Henri Cole, and a little touch of Charles Simic for seasoning. One line often leads to a gorgeously unexpected line. Sometimes he, as in the poem "Here and Now", can arrest your heart at the beginning: "After I found/ my blood in trouble/ /I could hear its rapid/ underground current swell--/ /terrorists setting tributaries aflame/ at low tide." Overall, the poetry is deep in all things philosophical, and psychological, of the self. I look forward to future books by this author and recommend him highly. Additionally, there is a worthy introduction by Richard Howard and the beautiful cover art is by the famed poet, John Ashbery.

Startlingly frank, revealing & strong

First, let me confess I'm not a poetry nut. Most verse leaves me cold, feeling boorish and left-out. Not this stuff. While I'm sure it'll please the more poetically sophisticated--it's that carefully, cleanly articulated!--it's also deeply satisfying for the "regular guy" who likes a good read. Evocative, clear, gripping, a tad confessional and by turns memoir-like, this collection has the heft and transformative power of a good novel, which for me is high praise. Be warned, however: Take in small doses. This is not to be gobbled up like a bag of potato chips but savored in reasonable, fully conscious and deeply satisfying bites. Highly recommend it.

Thunderclouds of Lilac are Never in Stereo

What the Right Hand Knows, Tom Healy's hyper-aware debut book of poetry, is a collision between the audible silence of a scratch, the cacophony of a dirty look and a contradiction like "do what I say, not what I do." The poems are striking and calm, inhabiting the landscapes of silent dinner tables, story-less evenings and spartan apartments. Do not expect ornament. Expect a celebration of the body--naked. Unlike so many first books, these poems generate their strength from refusing to say more than they need to. At their best, they answer Czeslaw Milosz's call for comprehensible poetry. The argument, there, is that incomprehensible poetry is a poetry of the lazy and privileged and prefers to hide in obscurity to maintain a position of loft and the social caste of the prophet. Whether Milosz is right or wrong, What the Right Hand Knows, all too well, is that it is exponentially more daring to say something in a language that has no time for incomprehensible peacocks.

GRACEFUL, CLEAR-EYED POETRY

Tom Healy examines sex, illness, beauty, the body, art, the counting-out of pills ("a curse on the one that's striped/turquoise and kelly green"), and the intense relief at finding love that lasts. I'd describe it as honest, sometimes (satisfyingly) blunt, never confessional. Healy embeds veins of narrative, sometimes obliquely, in these poems. As a fiction writer, I love that. Faulkner (I think it was Faulkner) said that one must write coldly to convey horror; "Chorus of Animals," about a childhood spent on a farm, slowly pans the yard and the barn and shows us "cats begging milk/coiled, wild and frightened,/stuffed in feedbags/and drowned in the pond" and ends with an auctioneer chanting and "a family broken in empty June." I had to read "The Anesthesiologist's Kiss" three times before I could move on from its haunting revelation. And a friend pulled the book away and got absorbed in a poem that begins: "What do we do when we hate our bodies?" One can't presume there is memoir here, but unquestionably there is truth.