Cracks in the Invisible (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780821419526)

Stephen Kampa's poems are witty and restless in their pursuit of an intelligent modern faith. They range from a four-line satire of office inspirational posters to a lengthy meditation on the silence of God. The poems also revel in the prosodic possibilities of English'shigh and low registers: a twenty-one line homageto Lord Byron that turns on three rhymes (one of which is "eisegesis"); a sestina whose end words include "sentimental," "Marseilles," and "Martian;" sapphics on the death of Ray Charles; and intricately modulated stanzas on the 1931 Spanish-language movie version of Dracula.

Despite the metaphysical seriousness, there is alwaysan undercurrent of stylistic levity -- a panoply of puns, comic rhymes, and loving misquotations of canonical literature -- that suggests comedy and tragedy are inextricably bound in human experience.