James M Keegan S J

These Hands James M Keegan S J

Keegan's crisp, direct poems let us feel both life's complexity and its simplicity. His tone spans the range from whimsy to tragedy. Nature awakens one's soul here, as a presence embracing or ominous by turns, especially in the vast ocean and the safe shore. Poignant intimate relationships strike the heart, as they are possessed or missed or yearned for. In a few poems, God is encountered up close but more often goes wrenchingly absent. Even animals communicate secrets and warnings by their subtle movements and sly glances. Keegan embeds these themes in personal experiences but creates verses which give them universal relevance, a skill that made him an international leader and teacher in the practice of spiritual accompaniment and spiritual direction. The innocence of his vividly recalled childhood moments discloses in adult years the larger and harder truths found in them for all of us. He writes of personal friendships, but we rediscover our own in his lines. In one striking series of poems, he even takes us into the ironies and bleak frustrations of his long struggle with Parkinson's disease: he thereby gives us strength to face our own brokenness. A disciple of Mary Oliver, e. e. cummings, Billy Collins, and others, Keegan keeps his poems accessible, his states of feeling precise, his images tangible. He does so by mastering various poetic forms: sonnets, other rhymed forms, free verse, and blank verse. "By turns fierce and humble," his grasp of life's paradox upholds his tragicomic view, giving us, his readers, "courage to love the broken world," each other, and ourselves.