Jewel Kilcher is a singer/songwriter from Alaska, known to the music world as Jewel. Her publishers claim she has been searching for truth and meaning since childhood, much like the rest of us I imagine, and on the evidence of the work in this collection of poems, if you allow that for an average young American truth and meaning reside in inchoate feelings, then that's what she's been doing all right.
Are these poems? No. Poems impact on and emerge from the prepared and disciplined heart and mind of the writer. A poem is as clear as a drink of water, as rigorous (and as rare) as an honest judge, as packed full of meaning as a ripe apple is packed with white flesh. A real poem has the qualities of precision, discipline, clarity and sophistication. What we have here, par contre, are texts that hover between the loose permissions of lyric-writing, where meaning is supported and often carried by the music, and the self-indulgent blather of a teen-and-twenty journal. An example? Sure. Try this: "blanketed by a citrus smile your splash of sincerity evades me your aim not at fault I just have no faith left for it to stick to" (Blanketed by a Citrus Smile).
You can guess at what she means to say, but she doesn't say it in the words on the page. And in a poem, the words have to do the work.
There is a long compact between the song and the poem, and in every age there are songwriters whose words draw their power from the powers of poetry. There is a delusion among the half-educated that poetry is, somehow , the superior art. Nonsense. Dylan didn't have to be the new Keats; Dylan is Dylan, as proud a boast as to be Keats. All true poets will salute Dylan, and Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell (and Jimmy McCarthy, Mick Hanly or whoever you're having yourself) as true artists. Songwriters.
Somewhere along the line, prompted probably by a failure to understand the inner discipline of free verse, the twentieth century became unwitting matrix to a vast, sludgy outpouring of agrammatical, asyntactical words and phrases, a baggy formlessness where trains of thought are permanently derailed, thought itself is suspect, feeling is paramount and meaning - well meaning is, like, um, basically whatever you feel it is. There's an awful lot of it in popular music, and not all of it is redeemed by the driving meticulous discipline of the song.
So, verses, notations, half-born song lyrics, semi-conscious revelations of a growing mind, A Night In Armor has all of these in abundance. Jewel, on this evidence, is feisty, brave, questioning, sardonic and occasionally humorous. An apprenticeship to a working poet, or a spell in a decent workshop would work wonders with the material in this book. They're not poems, though, no matter that this is the best-selling collection of "poetry" in the USA as I write.
Theo Dorgan's most recent publication is Sappho's Daughter.