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Michael Daly
Rosehip Plum
Cherry
Woodworks Press, Seattle
Paperback
chapbook, 5 1/2 by 7 inches, 32 pages, $9
The geography of our imagination extends way back,
through love and dread and across kinship, to places we remember only during
sleep. Michael Daly’s new collection of poetry is a vehicle for traveling
there, and through the windows of his words we can view our own hidden
landscapes.
Daly peoples these poems with nearly mythological
characters whose words and actions defy the challenges of daylight and
common sense. We all have such denizens in our memory, and they visit us
sometimes in quiet moments, to repeat their words and to once again play
their roles.
Like fellow travelers in all-night conversations lit by
dashlights or campfire, these poems speak to us in rambling associations. Or
to borrow from "On Air," in which the protagonist has hopped a freight train
to chase (or escape) memories of his heroes, and finds himself in the
company of hoboes:
Story coupled to story
rattling through a tunnel and
back out,
he talked through the clash
of steel and echo,
no one following, his white
beard floating the tilth of moon.
And the images! Images in "At a Graveyard in Dorchester,
Massachusetts," lead us back to small moments of childhood. Daly recalls,
for example, a family friend telling him of hell and purgatory. The memory
brings back to him what he saw during the telling, and in turn we see not
only a closeup of worn pavement, but also a small boy staring down at the
pavement, perhaps reluctant to hear of such tortures.
On Annabel Street,
the morning of my ninth birthday
pours into pits loose stones
escaped.
We tour Daly’s musings by means of a handmade letterpress
chapbook, pleasing to the eye and the hand. And publisher Paul Hunter has
decorated the work with three of his woodcuts, each deserving of a frame and
spotlight.
Finally, in "Silhouette," Daly hauls us back into the
daylight of present time to show his wife and son, with a banjo and a
mandolin, and himself, "in our skiff on January’s moon" paddling along in a
world where rationality sometimes slips away and heroes fall, but people,
and relationships, endure.
—Thomas Hubbard
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