Saint with a Peacock Voice

What People Are Saying

L. S. Klatt’s Saint with a Peacock Voice is such a fascinating and rewarding experiment! Part cento, part erasure, part collaboration, part puppet show (though is Klatt puppeteering O’Connor, or is O’Connor puppeteering Klatt?), these poems cohere into a pure, mysterious lyric mindscape, an exploration of how language is always fundamentally both interior and shared. The O’Connor we find in these poems can be our contemporary, addressing such things as 9/11 and global warming, and the Klatt we encounter can’t help but return obsessively to O’Connor’s complex and stark views on God. I’ve never read a book quite like this before, in which two minds wear each other and each other’s language in such a sustained way. The result is a true deepening and enlarging of what the lyric can be. -Wayne Miller

I can well imagine the poet savoring O’Connor’s idiom, phrasings, and rhythms, as he combs through the work to find words to suit his purposes. The result is a bell-choir of language, unearthed from its original context and set into the ground of another. Now we have a collection of cranky poems that long for spiritual answers. Of course, those answers don’t arrive, but the implied questions lurking behind the poems make themselves known by their absence, and the absence is a rich reward. This book puts me in mind of Marianne Moore and her fantastic beasts, and also of Wallace Stevens’s philosophical inquiries of the absurd. These are strange and beautiful poems, carefully wrought and attendant to all measures of reverence. This is a transcendent and illuminating book, sharp and penetrating in all ways. The poems linger with the reader, sometimes with a lull and sometimes with a twitch, as they should. -Maurice Manning

In Saint with a Peacock Voice, L. S. Klatt wrenches surprise from the familiar-which, after all, is one of the things poetry ought to do, maybe the thing. However, with regard to familiarity-if Klatt didn’t declare that the poems are all (something like) remixes of pieces Flannery O’Connor wrote, the reader might not know. Nor does one find chopped-up prose here, even though, strictly speaking, that’s what these poems are. Here, instead, are new, exciting poems that are yet afterlives of writing that came before them. These poems are doubly alive. -Shane McCrae

Saint with a Peacock Voice is a fascinating study in the beauty and possibility of poetic constraint. These fine-wrought lyrics, built from Flannery O’Connor’s ecstatic lexicon, are full of new music and spiritual depth. Poem by poem, we witness a keenly attentive, exploratory speaker emerge from the dense thicket of received language. I admire this poignant & particular voice as it celebrates & grieves for our troubled world, making ＂a violent butterfly, something strange and gold.＂ -Kiki Petrosino

L.S. Klatt’s first book, Interloper, won the Juniper Prize, awarded by the University of Massachusetts Press. His second, Cloud of Ink, garnered the Iowa Poetry Prize from the University of Iowa Press. Sunshine Wound was published by Parlor Press in 2015. Klatt lives and works in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he formerly served as poet laureate of the city.