Chuck O'Neil

Beyond Basilicas Chuck O'Neil

Beyond Basilicas is a remarkable collection the way it calls out across the decades and speaks to this present moment. With plainspoken reverence for the local life, O'Neil' s work is, as ever, finely-wrought ? its lines tuned like a drumhead with just the right tension: 'Rimshots and paradiddles popping off / The snare into that blue / Connecticut milltown morning air.'

'Backstory, ' the volume's signature poem is meditative, elegiac, with hints of Ecclesiastes throughout ? Vatican II and the Cold War, Kerouac, Thomas Merton, Eisenhower, Buddy Holly, Marylin Monroe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Viet Nam, Woodstock's 'marinated' fields ? the events of the past life recollected, living on, shaping us still.

With its sense of everyday earthly spirituality, Beyond Basilicas stands its ground: '. . .heaven enough down here / Eden as is.' The poems in this book of remembrance hinge on hope. Crucially, as well, they pay attention. To history. To the ancestors. The first kiss. The watering can. The reception. To what happened. What happens.