The Starry Messenger

A truly remarkable, and moving, series of poems.

Stubborn, irascible, truth-obsessed, Galileo is a living presence, his Venice teeming with Carnevale, fearful of the Inquisition, vividly realized in The Starry Messenger.

Keithley's talent is remarkable; he seems to possess Whitman's visionary imagination, that rare ability to evoke powerful, scaled-down, lyric details in the service of a vast structure.

Accessible, superbly crafted, this is Keithley at his best.

So moving and precise is Keithley's depicition of the life-loving Galileo and his enemies' death-dealing tools that the ending becomes inevitable if no less tragic.

[Keithley] displays his powers of spare yet arresting narrative in his new long sequence about Galileo. . . . a captivating poem woven of poems.

The success of the project as a whole is augmented by the richness of the individual poems which delight us with their moments of aesthetic pleasure and intriguing variety of form. . . . Evocative and riveting . . . satisfyingly sophisticated. . . These poems are by turn harsh, beautiful, funny and tragic. Keithley succeeds in casting spells that take us from the marvels of the Carnivale to the dungeons of the Inquisition. A rich and rewarding collection with a poetic voice that is artful, mature, inventure and sure.

Keithley's poems . . . need no revision, existing as perfect, self-contained and self-sustaining worlds. . . . [Keithley] reminds us of the wonder that is contained and reflected in the ordinary, of the poetry that is inherent in history, of how 'Heaven and earth off all / the cargo a man desires.'