"Navigating Wide Poetic Terrains"
Ben Meyerson (Canada)

Thomas Joachim Kingston, in his collection Out of Mind, consolidates an eclectic gathering of poems that, in appearing together, tangle up eras and emotions into a measured voice. Kingston puts himself forward as a poet with a very distinct viewpoint, and manages at times to carry an entire poem with a single gracefully worded insight. At their best, these poems have an astounding amount of staying power, with a well-controlled pace and memorable endings.

Indeed, in his strongest pieces, Kingston demonstrates a Dean Young-esque talent for the final line, a virtue demonstrated with particular finesse in his three-part poem for his father. The final lines in the first part, "My Father," grant the reader access to a finite moment, set in sharp relief to the abstraction that precedes it:

And once, so long now sunken in a storied
past, he wept.
But I was close to him
and merely young.

It is endings such as these that call Dean Young's work to mind. Young is adept at assembling a chaotic mixture of images and phrases, and then tying them together with the stilling finality of lines such as the one that closes off his poem "Gruss":

Such a paltry gesture, my surrender.

While Kingston does not attempt a shift so dramatic, he does manage to consolidate a handful of seemingly disparate images and ideas into a memorable closing statement – an ability for which many a poet would kill (figuratively). Indeed, in the second part of the series, he outdoes himself. In a jangling, fragmented narrative, Kingston relates his father's reaction to his poetic ambitions. The poem is presented as a choppy sort of dialogue, and all the arguments thrown around by both sides can be encapsulated by its final line. It is perhaps the strongest in the entire collection:

I am a man. Are you?

It is easiest to assume that such a challenge is the father's, directed at the son. However, it is equally plausible that it is meant to be the other way round, and it compresses twenty-five lines in the poem into six words that linger long after the book is set aside.

Such compression is, more than anything else, an indication of Kingston's mind. His topical range is wide, and his observations are both astute and incisive. The collection roves freely from multi-part reflections upon Blake and Dali to a cutting portrait of Sylvia Plath. The latter stands out as an especially fine piece of work, daring to at once undermine and confirm Plath's poetics. Kingston makes sure to acknowledge the odd magnetism that grants her such staying power:

still you confound

and whine, lick spine, lick spine
still shriek, perfection denied,
from beyond pale death…

At the same time, however, he musters the irreverence to point out Plath's ever-apparent pitfall in yet another of his excellent closing lines:

Daddy, Daddy I'm through,

Oh no, not you.

Despite such fantastic range, Kingston's work occasionally suffers when he relies too heavily upon an external figure. Although he rarely allows himself to fall victim to such a vice, a few of the references in his Blake poems fall flat: "because four is one too many" functions as a blunt nod to the four Zoas when it appears as the opening line in "Blake's Man," while the question "how dare he tiger him?" from "Blake's God" nearly begs for the reader's recognition ("Tyger! Tyger! burning bright…"). Such instances detract some power from what in many ways still is a very memorable cycle of poems.

Kingston is at his most effective when he allows his poetics to be self-reliant. While his frequent use of external figures adds a degree of colour and complexity to the collection that would be impossible otherwise, the individual poems are most memorable when they abandon such a mould. He has been gifted with a rare ability to weave unguarded displays of emotive and erudite poetics together to potent effect, and he does so with a seemingly unaffected aura of effortlessness. Out of Mind roams widely, and benefits from it – Kingston has an impressive knack for making a diverse range of topics his own, and it has yielded a collection of poems that demand a great deal from the reader whilst giving even more back.