Travelling Light (poetry)

“One of the best books I’ve read in some time with a range from the Objectivist to the Surrealist.”

“Ken McCullough celebrates the far corners of America with an unerring compass. Travelling Light is an invitation to a journey we all should be honored to take. We are in the company of a wonderful poet.”

“Ken McCullough is a globally talented writer, his artistic gifts ranging over fiction and film, but it is in these gentle and graceful poems, as perfectly crafted as logical proofs, that he reveals the hard-won spiritual depth of his art– a depth and diversity of form and feeling readers of every taste will find deeply satisfying.”

“There is a heady vitality, an eagerness for life, a joyful embracing of experience in Ken McCullough’s poems reminiscent of Kerouac’s first books. The poems in Travelling Light have an ethereal quality, like pipes heard or imagined in summer woods, which draws the reader seductively through moments of youthful discovery to later elegiac tributes to people and places discovered with love. McCullough takes time to care for the unadorned, for Amish farmers and junked-out Indian camps, for abandoned homes in ruins and the people who filled them with life, for finding peace in homely places and the agonies of Americans gone wrong with war. These poems reawaken the joys and sufferings of a generation that America has worked hard to forget.”

“I read the first half of Travelling Light on a jet plane bound for California. The second in the shade of a cottonwood grove on the Crow Nation in southern Montana. Both times it felt the same: a first-class journey.  Ken McCullough’s poetry is at home in either place. At once modern, clean; efficiently getting the job done, and timeless, rich with unspoken mysteries and the eternal magic of natural wonders carefully observed.”

“…McCullough is a poet of the rich and varied American experience– earthy and gritty, unconventional, rooted in the land and the labor required to build from that land, well-read but distinctly nonacademic, idealistic, visionary, sometimes disillusioned and angry, but nonetheless affirmative, celebratory, a weaver of sensual and spiritual fabric– blood, lymph, air, gut, nerve: synapse– that binds us together…. His sympathies are clearly with the engaged writers, the counter-culture writers, the visionaries, the innovative teachers and the frontiersmen of current American letters….”