The Mystery Still Drives Us

Book excerpt: The Mystery Still Drives Us is the second collection of ghazals by J. K. McDowell. The ghazal is a poetic form of possibility traced back to ancient Persia. The poems and even their stanzas are independent beacons of image, feeling and reflection. Subject and voice leap and flicker from stanza to stanza. Within the confines of six stanzas, McDowell exposes in each poem, threads of personal struggle and creative transcendence. Often at the end or near the end, the poem will address the poet directly by name. Calls to James, J. K., James K. or Jim appear in the fifth or sixth stanza. There is always mystery in the identity of this voice. The poems themselves do not bear titles in the traditional sense. They are merely identified by their closing words. This is the poem naming convention adopted in McDowell's first collection of ghazals, "Night, Mystery & Light." Throughout the collection are poems where the same ending word or phrase completes each stanza of the poem creating the truest modern approximation of the ancient poetic form. There the poem's driving repetition combines with leaping shapes of the stanzas producing a penetrating kaleidoscope of meanings. The work as a whole harnesses artistic, literary and spiritual energies, spiraling wide and cutting deep.