Walking on October

Kevin Pilkington is old school. Meanwhile, the known world is imperceptibly disappearing. But this is how he exists in time. His fatal kindness not only sustains him. Lollapalooza figures of speech, which readers have come to cherish, populate his work. No other poet has taken so much delight in extended metaphor. His love of New York City, its invention, our complex days and nights, blend in an indelible life. He applies colors to absorbent paper. A lucid dreamer, Pilkington loses control of destiny, releasing us into revery unbeholden to logic or volition. Am I a fool for believing in him? Like he says: “if you are lucky, everything / goes on like this city. Simply place / a bet on any corner you want / and you’ll find out not everything is rigged.”

—Burt Kimmelman, author of Steeple at Sunrise

Kevin Pilkington’s Walking on October is a journey of revelry, a music of the gritty and sonorous city streets and the poet’s probe to understand the changing human condition and the changing world: “old buildings are disappearing like newspapers.” Here is an acute and observant eye and a voice that packs a punch of lyrical kabuki. The poet treads on finding familiarity in the discord of the world: “The waitress never forgets my name is Honey.” Noticing the sublime and ethereal scenes that read like a Vermeer vignette of light and shadow. The poet riffs on the jazz of car horns and noisy sidewalks. This collection is a hymn, and a prayer of surviving and thriving…The poems in these pages indelibly cement themselves in the psyche and take us on a flight of grace.

—Cynthia Atkins, author of Still-Life with God

My cousin told me he found
Jesus which was the easy part
since he couldn’t find his way
out of Brooklyn.

So begins “Real Change,” a few poems into Walking on October, and by this point in the book you realize that Kevin Pilkington is incapable of writing a dull or predictable sentence. As in,
“the sky was clear except / for a cloud the color of a bruise a jet / left behind after banging into it.”

Or…

When you reach the top of the hill
and look across 2nd Avenue, there is a small
white sports car that you could drive
back to when you were a kid, and what
you are going through now was years away.

Or…

Since noon is never on time,
I quit eating lunch. Later in the day
I might snack on the hole in the middle
of a bagel to keep my weight down.

Pilkington’s book is part love song to the boroughs of New York, and part virtuoso riffing on the good old English language, which has never looked as spiffy as it does here. It’s been a long time since I read a book this bracingly fresh and invigorating.

—George Bilgere, author of Cheap Motels of My Youth