Daniel Tobin

Heart Fiat

Arts & Literature

“As epigraph to Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop offers a list of questions that frame the poems to follow. Similarly, Desmond Kon frames the greater body of Heart Fiat with questions given in the “daily examen,” a technique of prayerful reflection meant to poise the contemplative soul toward God. Rather than a geographical journey, what follows in Kon’s book is something closer to a theater of the soul, one richly and responsively populated with the words and images of saints and poets, artists and theologians, scriptures and iphones, and all refracted through this exuberant poet’s vibrant communion of art and prayer, his “holy song.” At once sweeping and probing, venturesome and precise, the poems of Heart Fiat know that while there will be times “nothing seems adequate as a salve or balm,” there is always before us “the great yes,” as well as the joyful and bracing knowledge that “love demands an idiom.”