DriftPaperback, 1 April 2005

What are we thinking at any given moment? What happens to a thought as that moment, on its way to oblivion, collides with its successor? Rambunctious, witty, joyous, and bittersweet, drift is an investigation conducted by a truly unfettered imagination. In fluid, sparkling cadences, Kevin Connolly's poems let the mind's downtime have the stage for a change -- the desert sky transformed; Spring Break as viewed by passing skipjacks; narratives of danger and dream narrative; a meditation on the business end of a sea cucumber; figures of history disfigured and left to wander the consumer grid -- such are the entirely odd, entirely current events in Connolly's world, a realm that stands at an acute angle from the place we normally live in but which we all seem to drift into. As one of Connolly's own high-voltage sonnets states, "what stops the heart starts the world." In drift's constant juxtaposition of abundance and loneliness, we hear what it is to confront a new century, having quite likely failed during the last. We're reminded, by a voice unlike any other on the Canadian landscape, that our solitude is painful yet precious.