Falling: The Broadkill Review – Winter/Spring Volume 19.1
Falling (2025) written by James Bourey
Falling
Karl Kempton – Poet, Photographer, Philosopher & Oceanic Activist
“Out of the dark hole of grief comes a startling, at times surreal, lyricism in this poetic narrative which fall as burning meteors, dark matters making light, to suddenly ascend into the love fall. The lesson of unbounded heart love attachment to parents unexpectedly parting while knowing life is a death sentence.”
Karl Kempton, Sandskrit of Oceano Dunes; Australia, 2021; Selected Lexical & Visual Mathematical Poems 1976 – 2022, 2022; Portraiture: Oceano Dunes to Tide Line, Australia, 2023; and chapbook, Moon Shadows, India, 2024.
Vuong Vu, Publisher – Tourane Poetry Press
The poems in Falling are of another multiverse. The layers of meaning, and experiences, behind the rhetoric can be traced along the line breaks and the use of white space on the page, which serve as silences, even sighs. These pauses rhythmically work on a multitude of various representations—transforming from a literal poem, to an almost a series psilocybin-like interpretations, as if from the subconscious level, reaching yet, another layer within the poetry.
In the poem, “Dating Tree Rings,” the reader has to fight in the inclination, the intuition, to read it as “when I could not wait/for love.” There is literal movement throughout this poem, perhaps of the beetle itself, metaphorically moving within the poem, carving out its path and revealed with the white spaces; thus, emulating the drive to survive, to love. This poem ends with the word “vulnerable” between two white spaces, offering another motif within the gravity of this collection.
The language is gorgeous, while embracing a softness, and earthliness to it.
Monterey Herald Newspaper, May 28, 2023
Monterey County Weekly – Newspaper, April 2023
“Connect with Characters From our Common Past at this Poetry Reading Event”
CSU Fresno – College of Arts and Humanities, January 2023
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PILAR GRAHAM 