Creating the Chorus: Joshua Kryah and the Question of Faith

Joshua Kryah’s poems slip easily off the contemporary tongue. But they would be just as at home in the mouth of a monk in medieval France, a Brazilian missionary, the courtier to his beloved. Their art is shelter to the questions of a young father, a poet living in Las Vegas, who wonders whether language can do justice to man’s desire to know. What meaning lives in the pull of faith? Is there craft in longing? Is there reality in myth? They are questions that come to the reader as voices twining like a pair of dancers: she, what is revered; he, what is from life:

the adored giving itself, unabashedly, over
to the adorer.

What I have only just begun to gather up
in my arms.

The stone rolled back.

Your body no longer.

The poet engages our most persistent doubts, our hopes, the range of our desires. Inspired by Saint Augustine, in the tradition of Dante, he presses onward, pursues the religious and transcends it, spilling in his wake a drizzle of words that slide slowly toward the well from which one draws meaning. These drops, colored by the spectrum of contemporary poetics, feature fractured lineation, words as if whispered, the working pause:

shape—

thou dismembered,

dismemberer.

~

Necessary, or else

said to be so, the damage

made all the more real by my thirst for it.

A reader interested in other then the seeker’s struggle toward the divine will find in these poems that which is decidedly human: the beauty and fragility of the body, life at the mercy of chance, resilience in the face of destruction. He will grapple with the speaker’s yearning, the speaker’s isolation, the way it mimics his own daily dip into company and drop back out again. Joshua Kryah’s work is the lover who closes his eyes, believing as he sinks into sleep, that ritual and solitary journey, his beloved will be beside him until “the coming of light.”         —   Carlin M. Wragg, Editor