Professor Kathy J Phillips

Honolulu Pilgrimage Professor Kathy J Phillips

A city-walker in Honolulu poses skeptical questions to a Shinto gateway and seems to hear from it some impudent and savvy replies. A stone used as a Hawaiian shrine marker presides over what the newspaper reports as the "return of a sacred land," but Kaho'olawe is still studded with unexploded ordnance. A fisherman describes Ke'ehi Lagoon after a molasses spill, where the multiplying glops seem to produce their own hiccups of rhyme: "sagging eels, looped and coiled, / gagging fish, heaped and spoiled, / spill gill kill frill, the rill is still / who gets the bill...." In the series "Encounters," a homeless woman bestows her own gifts, and a twirling adman, dressed as the Statue of Liberty (with frangipani lei), lures tax filers from the sidewalk. In "Koans for Now," fragments of pidgin conversation spark some sudden realizations connecting Micronesian immigration and the nuclear evaporation of a whole island in Bikini Atoll. The mood of the city-walker swings between bafflement and wonder, nudged now and then into an epiphany or two. The tone of the collection as a whole is witty, sardonic, or exuberant, rooted in the grit and foibles of everyday life in a big city.