Your Daughter's Country by John Dorsey
Blue Horse Press, 2019
Open John Dorsey's Your Daughter's Country to any page and you'll find yourself confronted by lines like these from Poem for Olin Marshall,
he would just gaze out at his property
in front of the old family general store
spitting dried up chewing tobacco
into a rusted coffee can
harvesting sunlight
without lifting a finger
gathering his history up like dead leaves
like a pile of bones
if the wind had any sense of mercy
it would've taken him too
In lines as lean as stray dogs Dorsey sketches both the physical and spiritual life of Olin Marshall, who we're told is the poet's grandmother's cousin. The dried tobacco, the rusted can, the bones and leaves, it's all faded, all run it's course. Olin is just marking time, gone unnoticed by even the wind.
The poet has his eyes on Olin, though, and on the whole parade of family and friends that wander the rawboned contours of Dorsey's prosody. The reader crosses paths with great aunt Leona and great uncle Tommy, dad's uncle Dave and great uncle Oscar, aunt Victoria and dad's cousin Dean, uncle Jerry and aunt Mary. It's easy to see why, as Dorsey admits in the title poem, “the family history gets a little fuzzy”.
Here too we find Mary Anthony and Coco Malone, Alex Nielsen and Jeff West, Wolfgang and Sarah Jayne. John Hollander, discussing Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology, a collection of fictional epitaphs rendered in poetic monologues which I found myself thinking of quite a bit while reading these portraits, wrote that “(i)n modern America, the pure heroic has become impossible.” I wonder if Dorsey's White Castle on New Year's isn't a rejoinder to that kind of pessimism.
i gave alex my last $6
when he offered to go
on a food run just after 3am
an hour later he came back
covered in fresh bruises & soiled snow
telling me he'd been jumped
by a couple of guys
on the way home
he said they took his money
his french fries & his crave case
of pulled pork sliders
but that he'd managed to hide
my bag of chicken rings
deep inside his bookbag
they were soggy
& tasted like heartburn
& the desperation of winter
along collingwood blvd
but we tapped two together anyway
as if they were filet mignon
& cheersed to another new year
in toledo.
The cheersing of greasy fast food, a meal which cost all of their money and not a little personal pain; a ringing in of something like hope when, really, considering the position these two inhabit, pessimism and despair would seem closer at hand feels pretty damn heroic to me.
Again Dorsey's language appears to have been run through a sieve, extracting the decorative and distracting. Jack Spicer wrote, “Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else.” Or as Kenneth Patchen would undoubtedly reassure the reader, there are no “Gold-plated poems / to stuff up / their mind's ass” in Dorsey's book.
In his otherwise excellent introduction to Your Daughter's Country, Shawn Pavey writes that Dorsey “chronicles the lives of his subjects with an impartial journalist's eye and pen.” That depiction of these poems I quibble with. Dorsey is far from impartial as he surveys the difficulties, humiliations, and small triumphs of his people. I would argue that Pavey was right on the money, though, when earlier in his essay he writes, “if you ever find yourself the subject of one of John Dorsey's poems, he loves you.” Your Daughter's Country overflows with warmth and tenderness,
sleepy eyed construction workers
are left to dream about true love
on their own as they wander back out
into the cold
(from Walking After Midnight in Linn, Missouri)
and
the last time I saw you
it should have been snowing
your own son sat beside you in a booth coloring
while struggling to finish his chicken fingers
even with your help
(from Poem for J.P.)
and
sarah jayne won't stay in one place
long enough to let me love her
but I still love her
(from Toledo Girls)
What's extraordinary about John Dorsey's poetry is that it does indeed feel like he is “harvesting sunlight / without lifting a finger”. With over fifty books and chapbooks to his name Dorsey has put in the time and the sweat. The years of staring at one fresh, empty page after another, attempting to render actual living beings out of the plainest language, that most rudimentary of tools, have brought him to a rare level of mastery. Dorsey proves that six lines is all it takes, not to pin down the particulars of a life, but to give them wings and set them to flight,
The Ballad of Emilie Rose
your life wasn't exactly a sad song
you got married
raised a family
& talked to the dead
through the mouths of butterflies
who promised to never fly away.
Closing Your Daughter's Country I'm reminded of another poet gifted with the ability to make something incredibly profound out of the barest bones of words, Cavafy's Voices lingers in my mind as a kind of coda as we leave Dorsey to his work.
Imagined voices, and beloved, too,
of those who died, or of those who are
lost unto us like the dead.
Sometimes in our dreams they speak to us;
sometimes in its thought the mind will hear them.
And with their sound for a moment there return
sounds from the first poetry of our life—
like music, in the night, far off, that fades away.
(trans. Daniel Mendelsohn)
Kristofer Collins is the founder of The Pittsburgh Book Review and longtime Books Editor for Pittsburgh Magazine. He is the co-curator of The Hemingway's Summer Poetry Series. His latest book The River Is Another Kind of Prayer: New & Selected Poems was published in 2020 by Kung Fu Treachery Press. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his wife and son.
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