Small, Imperfect Paradise - Dallas Crow

Today's book of poetry:  Small, Imperfect Paradise.  Dallas Crow.  Parallel Press.  University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries.  Madison, Wisconsin, USA.  2013.

Dallas Crow's Small, Imperfect Paradise is a bit of an emotional roller-coaster.  We get brief glimpses of a happy world but in short order the wheels come off and the poems paint the collapse of a family.  The redemption for the reader is in the quality of the poems.

The Aesthetics of Gravity

Think of the pleasure boys take in falling,

the hours they devote to it: ko'd, shot

in the back, machine-gunned in the 

gut; tackled, clotheslined, checked,

body-blocked, tripped; in slow motion

whenever possible; preferably

for an audience of friends or family;

dramatically, comically; into

pillows, hay, leaves, mud, snow—

any pile promising padding or a mess;

water, too; flips, splits, bellyflops,

can openers and cannonballs.

Some may argue that phylogeny

recapitulates ontogeny, that

they are reliving that initial fall

from grace themselves; others may

insist they somehow sense their

own mortality, and are preparing for

their future decline; but I am convinced—

watching my sons catapult and pirouette

through the invisible air, then replay

those all too brief moments of flight

again and again for friends—they are

enchanted by the aesthetics of gravity.

Icarus is their hero, not for his

Pyrrhic success or greedy heedlessness,

but for his most delightful failure.

...

Richard Brautigan had a poem about the end of love that I will paraphrase (because I am writing this from bed and am too lazy to go find it downstairs).

     there is no better feeling

     than waking up in the morning

     and not having

     to tell someone

     you love them

     when you don't love them

     anymore

(my apologies to Richard Brautigan for whatever I've done to the real poem - which I will find and reprint)

Dallas Crow is mining some of that same disillusioned territory.  But in these poems there are children, a family, and there is nothing bittersweet about the story - yet the poems are exactly that - bittersweet, tasty.

Small, Imperfect Paradise

Imperfect as it is, this

is paradise. My soon-to-be

ex-wife, the traitor,

sleeps upstairs, while I

lie awake down here.

Why is this paradise?

Because the kids

don't know yet.

...

These poems about loss are almost too familiar as they drag us over the rocky shoals of disappointment.  But these short, sharp jabs have a cumulative effect.  Crow has distilled his anger, grief and hope into something vibrant.

Divorce

Like a home movie played backwards, the gifts

are rewrapped and taken away, the guests

sidle awkwardly out, and then your children leave,

smiling and waving, leaving you alone in the empty

house. Alone. And then more alone. The silence

you've always adored wraps itself around you,

enveloping you in its octopus embrace.

...

Dallas Crow is a high school English teacher at the Breck School in Golden Valley, Minnesota, he lives in St. Paul.  His poems have appeared in numerous journals.

paralellpress.library.wisc.edu

By following this link you will find a recording of Dallas Crow reading his poem "The Holy Order of Fish Handlers".  The recording is from The Beat, Northern Community Radio, KAXE & KBXE.

https://www.prx.org/pieces/98872-the-beat-dallas-crow-the-holy-order-of-fish-ha