"The King's Question" by Brian Culhane

The King’s Question by Brian Culhane is a compilation of poems creating a brief, yet complex commentary on “how the ancient world impinges on the modern.” The poems reflect on historical monuments which have shaped the modern world and play with the notion of answering why. However, this answer can never truly be found due to lost knowledge of the answers or uncertainties implanted in society by the gods.
It should be noted, however, that each poem retains its own personality and hidden message. I say hidden message because Culhane’s poems represent the lives of people who are seeking to find truths that are shrouded in doubts, and at times even proven to be deleted from history. In this way, it is the readers’ job to induce these truths from the poems. The order of the poems itself is a journey of understanding. The poems start off almost foggy, and to a green reader like myself, difficult to derive meaning from. However, as one progresses through the book of poems, they become easier to understand as their rhetoric begins to spell out the inevitable connection of the past and the present.
Culhane’s poems, though alike in content, cover a variety of different forms, mainly unrhymed free verse. They not only vary in length, sentence structure and ending techniques, but also in aesthetics. His poems range from two lined stanzas with sentences consisting of complete thoughts, to five lined stanzas that are severely enjambed. Having said this, each poem, regardless of how it appears on the page, or where its sentences are broken, can be read as a cohesive story. That is, Culhane is flirting with the idea that no form is form. It does not matter how his poems are written, they are still going to tell the same stories in a smart and witty way.
Every poem in The King’s Question is told through the eyes of a single narrator. I assumed it was the same narrator in each poem, but others could read them as several firsthand accounts. I believed the narrator to be the same because the tone in every poem proved to be very similar. Within the poems there are few other people mentioned. Sometimes there is a single person whom the narrator interacts with or is noting, but there are rarely more than five people mentioned within a poem. All of these intimate firsthand accounts give the poems credibility and allow the reader to develop a deeper relationship with the poems and their content.
Overall, Culhane has created a beautiful and challenging set of poems alluding to the connections of past times to our present lives. Through the journey that is The King’s Question, the reader discovers how even history that has been lost to the touch and sight still affects our lives today.