The Manifesto and Its Blue Ball

Llewellyn McKernan's The Manifesto and Its Blue Ball is a collection of earlier poems

(that show the writer feeling and figuring in insightful ways toward a poetic maturity), as

well as more recent poems filled with what Jerome Bruner believes is the central characteristic

of creativity-"effective surprise." In "The Manifesto" and the other title poem, "The Blue Ball,"

we enjoy the unusual angles the poet takes on her remarkable subjects, and elsewhere we are

treated to surprise and delight not only in the deep meanings and metaphors, but in the delicious

music of the poet's language: "Undress the mystery/of summer, savor the fall's skill-killing frost,

winter's/grid against the sky" ("Don't Be Down-Right"). These poems are Llewellyn McKernan and we treasure them.

-Richard Hague, Author of Studied Days: Poems Early & Late in Appalachia



In Llewellyn McKernan's The Manifesto and Its Blue Ball, a light, often rhymed, sometimes childlike whimsy veils a series, at times unsettling, but finally affirming view of poetry and nature. In "Here's the Situation," "dawn and noon" and "frog and loon" release their rhymes only to reveal the unique poem that's grounded in its "own/unearthly/unrehearsed howl." In "I Believe," "it's always winter in the Land of Faith," but the poet takes the snow there and

makes it into a "snowman the children love." In "A Real Thing," "a bright green willow/

reflected in a pond in summer/is lucid and lovely-But don't try to touch it." Yes, beauty is

fragile but powerful. And so is The Manifesto and Its Blue Ball.

-Richard Spilman, Author of In The Night Speaking



This is the poetry of a fully realized artist, driven by faithfulness to her craft and devotion to

the crucial but difficult journey of dwelling in the beautifully stressed shapes of human

experience or the treacherous and lovely terrain of the imagined places of the mind and heart-

both being ultimately a passageway to the life-line of the poem itself, "The Blue Ball," pursued and celebrated in "the duo of space and time/present to our presence," "from which it borrows only what/it turns and returns" to the ready reader's heart. I will keep this smart and lovely collection close always.

-George Eklund, Author of The Island Blade