Husbandry by Matthew Dickman (reviewed by Alex Russell)

Matthew Dickman’s newest book of poems, Husbandry, focuses on parenthood. His poetry does not mince words – thematically, his intentions are clear; syntactically, there are no clumsy echoes. Everything is right there, visible and clear.

As a single parent with two young sons, the author’s world – as revealed in his poems – often revolves around everyday life. We see him folding clothes, cleaning dishes, and cooking food. In sparse yet precise language, he presents everything – from the monumental to the mundane -- with due diligence and a measure of concerned distance.

Most of the poems in Husbandry follow an established structure. Each stanza is made up of two short lines, making up a careful-sounding dialogue. After a while, the deliberate weight of each word becomes a signpost along a varied, expansive, living path.

Many pieces include conversations he has had with his sons. “Crossing Guard” is one such series of moments between a father and son as the two talk about lost friends. Without romanticizing it, being overly sentimental or trivializing it, death is a subject that is evenly threaded throughout each stanza. As the two talk about absent friends, the pair finds a dead animal in the road.

“For a moment I think / we will be standing / here forever, he and I / watching death / do its slow work / like someone restoring / a painting / but in reverse.”

It is this kind of soft dissection of death – this large and all-encompassing thing – where Dickman finds his power. Part of this skill rests in the author taking his time with the experiences and ideas he wants to discuss; in a thought-out and patient manner, he lays everything out for the reader.

Plain language does not equate to simplistic thinking and Dickman’s poetry is a testament to this. In a piece titled “Father,” he delves into the significance of names:

“Fathers with names / like Joseph, / Yosef, Josiah, Yasef, / meaning he will add…Fathers with names / like Ernie, Ernest, Ernesto, / Arnošt, meaning kindness.” With an almost stoic grace, Dickman ponders little asides like this – taking in minute complexities and the interconnectedness of language, human culture and thought – without ever making it feel like stalling for time or senseless, aesthetic meandering.

“Father” ends with a bittersweet but crucial realization on the author’s part: “I know / there are / really three children / in the story of my life. / I must make a home / for each of them.”

It’s true that many sons become fathers, but Dickman goes several steps further to illustrate a kind of fluid, revolving continuum. Three short stanzas reveal something tender and real at his core both as a writer and human being.

The poem ends without any huge reveal or twist; there is nothing prefabricated or resupplied for cheap emotional string-pulling. “I must make a home / for each of them” is an instance of pure personal reflection. Here, Dickman balances out both the internal and external aspects of his life and, in a broader sense, human nature.

Taking into account his naked fears, anxieties, and his myriad responsibilities as a father, many poems in the book – without spelling it out – attempt to arrive at some pertinent balance.

To find consistent harmony, in writing as in life, everything must be appraised. Thankfully, in Dickman’s writing, nothing is too big or too small to feature in his gorgeous, elegiac writing.

In “Lilac,” he savors “that amazing lemon / frosted lemon cake” from Starbucks, while he holds his youngest son and listens to “his body living, / alive outside / his mother’s body, and the lilac / outside on the street, outside / everyone, and heavy in the rain.”

As these stanzas make their way down the page, their tone is one of patience and resilience, and free of any ego. They move from a casual scene inside a Starbucks to the weight of the external world, always in flux.

Even though certain poems may seem to go off on tangents, Husbandry is to poetry what Dark Side of the Moon is to rock and roll; every aspect fits into a natural progression of thought and feeling. Interspersed throughout the book are prose pieces, two-lines at most, highlighting his sons Hamza and Owen and their individual reactions to their parents’ separation as well as their own burgeoning journeys in life.

Dickman’s writing is supremely candid about all things – separation from his wife is no exception to this. At times unabashedly pointed, at others frank and forgiving, the separation, in literary or thematic terms, could be considered a major inciting event in Husbandry.

More so than in actual, physical terms, what the separation took to mean for Dickman is a constant work-in-progress; a reappraisal of himself, Matthew Dickman – adult, writer, father, son, friend, lover.

In “Parenting and Virginia Woolf,” beautifully and bluntly, Dickman writes: “For weeks after / the separation really / kind people kept / telling me that I was / on a journey, this is / your journey / they would say / and I would want to / scoop out their / eyeballs with one / of my grandmother’s / silver grapefruit / spoons.” Spiteful? Maybe. But entirely human and universal.

Like the book as a whole, “Parenting and Virginia Woolf” takes time to develop, examine, exist in, and finally outgrow, the author’s individual, private hurt. “I am not on a journey, / I am cooking / dinner for my kids. / I am washing their / hair and underwear, / I am trying to go / for walks outside, / trying to eat more vegetables.” Not a journey, but a process.

A lot of the time, while reading Husbandry, it was hard to keep going. Dickman’s writing is “raw” – not in the sense of something unfinished, because his poems are as complete as diamonds, but in the way that exposed flesh will be red and sensitive to everything, even light.

In the end, it’s this sensitivity that, no matter how close he cuts to home, makes one return to his writing. There is something fulfilling and wonderful in being able to meet pain and vulnerability on level footing. Poetry, it seems, is Matthew Dickman’s way of doing just that.

Near the end of Husbandry, Dickman reflects in “Anniversary” how “The night isn’t as long / a year later, or bullied or rootless or night at all.” As painful as it often is, growth is still growth – eventually making us a little wiser, if not stronger.

Husbandry by Matthew Dickman, published in 2022 by W. W. Norton & Company. 142 pages.

Alex Russell earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from George Mason University and now works in the field of journalism and publishing. He has contributed poetry to a variety of literary magazines and art journals, such as The Elevation Review, 300 Days of Sun, and The Ignatian Literary Magazine. His contributions to the Falls Church News-Press, a locally owned newspaper in the Washington, DC area, can be found online at fcnp.com.

Time Is A Mother by Ocean Vuong (reviewed by Alex Russell)

It can be very difficult, when evaluating a piece of art — in this case, Ocean Vuong’s sophomore poetry collection, Time is a Mother — not to make comparisons to other, related works. It is almost a compulsion; having to connect the thing you are talking about to something else just to explain it better.

Connection, successfully or unsuccessfully, pleasantly or with disastrous aftermath, is a major theme in Vuong’s work; something that he evaluates with ease, though, never bogging the narrative imagery down. He does it earnestly and with alarming certitude. As a writer reading another writer’s stone-cold brilliance is envy-inducing and inspiring. As a reader, it takes me out of myself to reconnect me with some of my missing pieces.

Vuong’s sharp and powerful command over his chosen method of communication with the outside world is exemplified through his control of pacing and rhythm.

“The Bull,” an introductory piece, is a crystal clear, unflinching realization centering on physical as well as emotional touch. It’s also a very gorgeous, near-sublime poem about understanding yourself through the help of something (or someone) else.

Most if not all of the poems in Time is a Mother are gorgeous. Many of them seek to provide context for the painful, and sometimes unexplainable things, in life.

It may be difficult for readers unfamiliar with confessional poetry — developed and brought to cultural and academic acknowledgement by many brilliant writers such as Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Allen Ginsberg — to feel comfortable with Vuong’s words. That is okay.

The occasionally jagged edges of his stanzas (visually) and the occasionally robust, economical, or jarring word-choice (for example: “fuck he said/oh fuck you’re so much/like my little brother,” from the poem “Dear Peter”), are intentional in their bluntness without shining a big glaring spotlight on themselves. Being human can be a brutal experience; Vuong’s work, in its careful and empathetic approach to life and people, provides a series of images that ring with honesty and a simple goal of saying, here it is.

There are signs and symbols one might not expect in Time is a Mother. The image of a Colt factory, or a plate of “triple stack…jumbo pancakes at Denny’s after top surgery.”

“New England’s endless/leaves. Maybe I saw a boy/in a black apron crying in a Nissan/the size of a monster’s coffin.” These pictures feel all the more real because Vuong does not shy away from an intimate and painstakingly real point of view.

Some of these scenes almost ooze with palpable isolation, like the “backyard, so dark,” evoking, at least in my mind, the great painting Cape Cod Evening by Edward Hopper.

There are voices from other rooms and other eras peeking through as well. They appear like visitors or guides to provide commentary or elucidation. They are not necessarily foreign to Vuong; they are rhythms and sounds he might have picked up on his way.

“I know the room you’ve been crying in/is called America,” from “Beautiful Short Loser,” sounds like something from a piece of prose out of a Jack Kerouac novel. Yet it also feels indigenous to Vuong’s experience as a writer and as a person. The two are inseparable if you do it for long enough.

The prose-poem “Nothing,” near the middle of the book, is reminiscent in form and style to Dennis Cooper’s poetry. Violence and homosexuality and deep, passionate love are all characteristics of Vuong’s verse, just as they are of Cooper’s. Perhaps this is another junction where their poetry meets — however temporarily. The further one reads, the more obvious it becomes: Vuong’s voice and syntax are entirely his own.

A segment from “Nothing” reads, “But to live like a bullet, to touch people with such intention. To be born going one way, toward everything alive.” This is how Vuong’s poems found me with his first poetry book, Night Sky with Exit Wounds and this is how it finds me now, with Time is a Mother.

Of Vietnamese heritage, Vuong paints surrealistic scenes of the war in Vietnam in both collections. In this book, however, unlike in his first, surrealism becomes almost an end and not just a means. Sometimes horrible things cannot be explained, but their debilitating effects can be weakened through deconstruction.

“On the wall, the shadows of their erections fall, then rise./We are rare in goodness, and rarer still in joy./Their clothes/return to them, like crumpled laws./He walks backwards as the soldier walks backward. They/smile at each other until both are out of sight. The night/returns to itself, less whole. The Maybelle Auto marquee a/beacon in the fog.” Thus ends one of his poems, “Künstlerroman.” It appears near the end.

Violence, war, tragedy, love, sex, death, spatial emptiness, emotional emptiness, terrains of all kinds, and the colors of nature and of night, among many other things, make up the ingredients of Vuong’s work. He finds a balance for everything wrong and right in the world.

Time is a Mother succeeds because it doesn’t play games with the reader or with itself. There is a deep search for justice, a cry like a voice out of the forest on the edge of town, that cuts into the air and holds. Where there is no justice found, Vuong’s poetry sticks around to remind the reader that justice is a stepping stone on the way to love — and that love makes us and unmakes us, over and over.

Time Is A Mother by Ocean Vuong (reviewed by Alex Russell)

Time Is A Mother by Ocean Vuong, published in 2022 by Penguin Press. 114 pages.