Husbandry: Poems [Paperback]

By turns tender, heartbroken, enraptured, delighted, angry, melancholyall the turns of human family life.Jesse Nathan, [Matthew] Dickman delivers us into the squelching heartlift and heartbreak of parenthood. The greater than human world and the mundanely human are bound up in this book. Accomplices in horror and happiness. Dickman relays a dailiness examined so closely it often alters into something almost strange, like that bizarre moment you attend to the steps of an oft-repeated action and note, with anatomical, perhaps even scatological, precision, how wild and wonderful it is to be alive. The poems in [ [Dickmans poems] assemble a haunting diorama of specific, heart-piercing references, like a long equation he's trying to solve. In a clear, spare voice, Joseph relegated to holy backdrop. Vaders chilling confession to a wounded Luke. Fathers undervalued, hastily drawn, overly romanticized, dismissed, dramatized, overlooked. Fathers called upon to be substitute everythings, then commanded to be less than shadows. Matthew Dickmans signature lyricism electrifies this new fractured phase of his life story, as a suddenly solo father who witnesses the visceral but tender unreeling of family, who must daily redefine his root as both father and son, and whose utterly stubborn love for his children reveals the chaotic, ungolden work of parenthood. Matthew Dickmans tenderly forensic, accomplished, and confronting book moves through bitterness to the domestic realities of the work of responsibility and love for our children. In the anxiety of being, nightmares have to be negotiated, and the role we play in showing a way through has to be scrutinized as we go. Its not easy, it never was, for any of us. And thats the gift of this bookthough so specific, so personal, it can be for any of us. US