Book Review 2018-001
The Second O of Sorrow by Sean Thomas Dougherty
2018 by BOA, Editions, 72 pages
(I purchased this signed copy direct from the author shortly after it was published).
I've noted elsewhere that The Second O of Sorrow reminds me of flayed skin, or crumbling teeth--the poems within rub readers' nerves they are so raw. Dougherty grew up in Ohio and currently works a third shift in Erie, Pennsylvania and he captures the working class of the Rust Belt like one who has truly been there for years.
An early poem establishes his Rust Belt beginnings:
Somehow, I am still here, long after
transistor radios, the eight-tracks my father blared
driving from town to town across Ohio
selling things, the music where we danced
just to keep alive. I now understand I was not
supposed to leave so soon, half a century
The next poem's title could almost be a poem in itself, "What Do You Say to a Daughter When She Suspects Her Mother Is Dying," but it's well worth the time to read the entire half-page prose poem, which ends:
Or back to a place and a time where the Medicine Mother grinds a few twigs, some leaves into a powder that tells the body again how to spell the names of hte Gods in its bones. You want to say draw me a window so I may step into and take you to see her when you were a baby and she could run through the grass through the Balkan fields of yellow flowers and climb the mountain of the cross. A window to show her before her mother's hands turned blue as the sky after it has snowed.
Grief is described as having a "wet dog smell," and "Red dirt women can all speak to their dead." "Blood-red leaves like knives cut the air of autumn," and a poem could be "the hole that is left when the bullet goes through." Jobs are worked, jobs are lost, loves are found and lost as well. Toledo as a child, memories of a father, worries of health, long shifts in hard labor jobs fill Dougherty's works here.
Current, or recent, public names appear at times--a poem for Tamir Rice, and later a poem about Lebron James that can be seen as a metaphor for all of Ohio (and subsequently the entire Rust Belt to a degree). There are beautiful images such as those at the beginning of the poem, "Something Lovely as the Rain":
When pain pauses a new world emerges, something lovely as the rain, or like the sunlight strolling in the afternoon without teeth. Or a cracked egg, or a piece of glass.
Dougherty captures the working class Rust Belt and finds happiness, and hope, and sparks where maybe others would have to search too hard to notice: a night in a karaoke bar, seeing a meteor shower from a gas station parking log, a lunch lady telling stories while sipping a beer at the Polish Falcons social club, and more.
The poem "Youngstown Monologue: Captured Light Stained Glass", a wonderful poem about caring for an aging mother, ends:
I know to live inside this fragile skin
is to be the light captured by stained glass.
It's a couplet that to me describes living inside this fantastic collection of poems.
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