Jeff Grinnell

Flickering Kingdoms Jeff Grinnell

Flickering Kingdoms evokes the wider social order as an interacting system on the societal, group and individual levels. In closed and open forms, these linguistically playful, condensed, phonetically rich, jazzily rhythmic, and at times hard-hitting poems balance concrete, precise language with controlled ambiguity. Often-in such poems as "The Moonlight Hitchhiker," "Found on a Fallen Conscript," "The Unseasonable," "Somebody Fished from a Swimming Pool," or "The Down-home Harrower"- speakers from various places in society offer their stories, a number of which fail to relate the entire truth but still reveal more about what their tellers think than they realize. In diction ranging from street to manor, employing myth and occasionally dream logic, the poems in this collection explore interrelated psychological, moral, economic, political, social and spiritual stresses inherited from our cultural past which underlie and unsettle the contemporary urban landscape.