In his second collection of poems, Happyland, Kevin Connolly contemplates the insecurities of contemporary society in a circumlocutive manner, maneuvering around his subjects in an opaque and often bizarre language. For two-thirds of the book, Connolly’s poems meander from idea to idea, image to image, without much indication of what holds his thoughts together. The fact that they are affixed within a poem is supposed to be enough—the poem itself is the glue, not the content—and my concern is that frequently it is not. For instance, it is no mean feat to make sense of “Fog sweeps through / the swaying insects / centres the better dentures” (“Pictures of Your Pictures”) or “Folk singers have released the minks / their razored claws churn the countryside / into a rich yet hairy butter” (“Grasslings”), and I suspect I’m not really supposed to. Connolly’s use of nonsensical association improves somewhat with “Dazzling Slumber,” a series of twelve short poems that explore the dream state and drift into phantasmagoria. These sparse pieces are like Imagist poems without images; they thrive on their own internal logic—which, dreamlike, is illogical—and succeed through their purposeful absurdity. However, all of my above critiques evaporate in the final of the book’s three sections, the titular sequence “Happyland,” an excellent example of the documentary poem that stands high above the earlier lyrics. In fact, I’m hard pressed to recall a book so neatly bifurcated in terms of quality and style. The subject is a deliberately set fire at an illegal New York nightclub, populated mostly by Honduran immigrants, which killed 87 people on March 25, 1990. The nine poems of the sequence move chronologically in reverse (to emulate, according to Connolly’s notes, the novenario, a nine-day Roman Catholic prayer period preceding an anniversary mass) from the erection of a monument through the trial of the perpetrator back to the moment the flames are set. Connolly’s handling of the horrific circumstances of the arson does what good documentary poetry is meant to: interpret the event, yet allow the event to do the talking; the miracle is in the arrangement. He approaches the scene with sombre dignity: “At Happyland the single door / remains boarded, the sign / that smiled over the bodies / shoulder to shoulder, taken down / the day after, the irony / lost on no one, and with everything! else, too much to take.” The reverse order gives the poem a great tension as it mirrors the approach we must take to any historical event, from the present to the past. Connolly is at his strongest in this profound and difficult meditation on mourning and commemoration of mass death, on justice and individual culpability, and on the worst kind of immigrant experience possible—to die in the land of new hope. My prediction is that it will set the bar for Connolly’s future work.

⁰ Winner, Critic’s Desk Award for Brief Review 2004
Arc 51, Winter 2003