Small Sillion

Joshua McKinney's fourth collection, Small Sillion, enacts a lyric struggle to perceive the numinous in a world marked by violence. The term sillion, as used by Hopkins in his famous poem, "The Windhover," refers to a furrow turned over by a plough. For McKinney it is both prelude to fertility, and wound, a scarring of the land. Maintaining a tension between the visionary and the mundane, between joy and despair, these poems posit a border between language and the living world; they constitute a personal eco-poetics of skepticism, one that respects language's utility and radiance, while acknowledging that the world's complexity lies beyond the grasp of language