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The House of Blue Light is the second collection of autobiographical “memory poems” by Catholic-schoolboy-gone-bad-turned-poet-made-good David Kirby, a stand-up comic of verse if ever there was one: “in Stardust Memories . . . these wise space aliens who visit Earth . . . tell [Woody Allen] that if he really wants to serve humanity, / he should tell funnier jokes wait, that's my duty, / I think, that’s my public duty! Because sooner or later, / we all turn upside down.”
Wearing both heart and wit on his sleeve, Kirby confides in longish narrative poems events he actually or vicariously experienced–as a child, a teen, a young man, and now—as well as some future scenes he imagines. Literary theorists Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes; Little Richard and Muhammed Ali; Herman Melville, James Dickey and Henry James; friends, family, personal heroes, and acquaintances, including the Ah Oui Girl of Paris and Tige Watley’s Whoah of Baton Rouge, are all equally alive in Kirby’s poems.
David Kirby, the W. Guy McKenzie Professor of English at Florida State University, is the author of numerous books, including four previous poetry collections, most recently My Twentieth Century and Big-Leg Music. A regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, Christian Science Monitor, and New York Times Book Review, he has contributed poems and essays to such journals as the Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Gettysburg Review and is included in Best American Poetry 2000, edited by Rita Dove. He is married to the poet Barbara Hamby and lives in Tallahassee.
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