Title: Balloon Passages
Author: Donald Kihm
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 978-1-4918-7266-6
Pages: 80
Genre: Poetry
Reviewed by: Allison Walker

Read Book Review

You didn’t read Donald Kihm’s poetry in grade school. His is not the limericks you wrote in English class, nor the strict rhyme and meter of the Canterbury Tales you did read. Balloon Passages is modern poetry; poetry like the traffic on a New York City sidewalk.

Kihm writes poems about everyday people and the ordinary objects we take for granted. He makes you appreciate the fine details of a seasonal wreath on the door, or a dried leaf on the sidewalk. And then Kihm takes these ordinary objects and describes them in dynamic ways. Take for example, “Bulb Warmth,” a poem about Christmas decorations: “…horses loping across the steel/ snow Lips electric lit.”

Not all of the poems in Balloon Passages are about concrete things, as much of Kihm’s poetry is about the way something makes you feel. To use “A Chinese Landscape Painting” as an example, the poetry may not be about wreaths or leaves, it may be about watching someone practice Tai Chi in the park; how your eyes will take in a million different details all at once, and how your mind carries you to a distant mountaintop, and how you then fold seamlessly back into your ordinary life. There may be a very subtle play on words; Kihm’s poems tend to be short so every word is there for a precise reason. The three-line poem, “Cherished times” beautifully demonstrates the way Kihm can re-envision an ordinary event, and the clever way he uses his words: “stories read at night/ a voice through the storm of life/ laying bedrock down.”

While “Cherished times” is a striking example of many of the reasons Balloon Passages is unique, it also perfectly demonstrates Kihm’s use of lines, and how he makes you read in short, staccato bursts. You have to read the poems twice, you need to find out how to read them in your mind so they make sense to you. The beat in these poems can become so loud you don’t hear the words.

Balloon Passages is separated into the iconic divisions of youth, adulthood and seniority. The separation helps organize the poems into a collective whole. The work is skillfully structured, each poem inserted into the collection as purposefully as every word has been placed into each poem. Balloon Passages is poetry for people tired of epigrams and ballads, who want poems for modern readers, and who want to rediscover their lives in startling and beautiful ways.