I’m very grateful to Daniel Moysaenko for this attentive reading of Huge Cloudy in Kenyon Review. Here’s a brief excerpt (full review here):
Carty does not recoil. He gathers variety into his poems. He strikes a balance between the easeful conversational and intricately sonic, embracing the private and public’s overlap, admitting both the (post-)pastoral and (sub)urban, traversing a lot of ground. Formal variation and differences in linguistic density are also notable characteristics of the collection. His range and capacity for image, music, metaphor, feeling, and thought stand beyond poetic movements and discrete devices. It reminds me of Ruefle’s comments on tone: he puts the fish in the pan and cooks it. And his particular voice—playful but never glib, perspicacious but not self-serious—emanates naturally from each decision and turn, bringing itself into being. Huge Cloudy is a remarkable example of nuance and calibration of language. Even its title illustrates this. It truncates and pokes at the grandiosity of Keats’s lines, “When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, / Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance.” Carty’s titular poem’s line break—“October means huge cloudy / days”—remakes the adjectival coupling, tonally elastic and bright.
Like tone, weather reacts to the past, determines the present (whether a natural disaster or blissfully sweaty afternoon picnic), and accumulates force with markers of the future. It is not instinctual exactly, but in part learned. It is not pure accident, but contingent on circumstances, seemingly inevitable but delicate. Like Carty’s tone. A distant meteorological system. The bell of an old village too many miles away to hear, ringing. It’s as if Carty can hear it. I thank him for that.
