A Few Words Will Do - Softcover

"Lionel Kearns has been hovering over our poetry scene for years. Now we have his selected poems at last, and the bird has landed.
-- George Bowering

These brief but concentrated pieces of literary work seem at first simple in their approach and straightforward in their intent: designed to be read easily and then to be carried away in our memories. As if they were ours. But when one person writes "this is what happened, this is what I remember, this is what I saw, this is what I know," any reader stands in for and thereby becomes the absent "I" or "eye" of that written text. The deconstruction of this inescapable process of language, metaphor, is what preoccupies Lionel Kearns in A Few Words Will Do.
There is a materiality to the world over which the greatest abstraction cannot triumph, Kearns proposes here: all abstraction seeks to arrest time; all sentiment seeks to reverse it.