Ed Madden’s Prodigal: Variations
Lethe Press, Inc. 2011. ISBN: 1-59021-340-8
This morning a fire was slowly dying in Onslow County to the north of Wilmington. It had, in two days, consumed some 4,000 acres and though it was miles away, the air reeked of smoke. Cycling was out of the question—as was walking the dogs or even sitting in the garden with the last of the camellias. I don’t like spending mornings indoors, even when I’m writing. I like it even less when I’m not. And I like it even less than that when I am not writing and I’m worried about the state of the world or about someone who for one reason or another has found a place in my heart.
Suffice it to say that this morning did not begin with much promise.
So, I turned to the stacks of must-read and must-reread poetry books around the house. Some of them are gifts (several from generous publishers) and some I have purchased over the past few months and years. And so I passed the hours with poets—new and familiar (Ed Madden, Patricia Fargnoli, Eduardo C. Corral, Ron Mohring, Dan Vera, Jason Mott, Kristin Bock, Lavonne J. Adams and others). Outside, the smoke was clearing, but the sky remained gray until sunset. Inside, it was a day of poetry. Inside, it was whatever weather the poets conjured in my hands.
Ed Madden is a poet who can conjure weather like few others—weather of the land and of the heart. His landscapes are his confessions. In “Rite at sunset” from his shattering and beautiful new book, Prodigal: Variations, Madden writes:
Ed Madden is a poet who can conjure weather like few others—weather of the land and of the heart. His landscapes are his confessions. In “Rite at sunset” from his shattering and beautiful new book, Prodigal: Variations, Madden writes:
Look east: a dark and empty sky.
Look west: the place that was home.
Take the envelopes of seeds,
expired and dry, from the shed.
Scatter them like empty prayers.
Blame the earth, blame the sky.
His lines are clean and spare, his language precise and simple, and yet there is no detail missing—or rather, what details are missing become an absence which is felt as strongly as any presence.
But then, this book is a book of absences which are felt more keenly than most presences. In the speaker’s case, it is the chosen absence of a father which drives many of the poems and it is this absence which gives the book its title. That said, this is not simply a book about one father or about one son—it is a book about the distances between men. Some of them are wide and seemingly impossible to bridge and yet somehow marking the body:
A certain man had two sons.
They are the empty chairs at the table.
They are the dust on the bedpost.
They are the scar on the brow.
And at times this distance is bridged in other lands, through other bodies, through impossible transformations as it is in “Dream Fathers”:
The bridge’s end
may veer; each night I go someplace else,
dark cypress swamp on either side.
One night my father is the driver and the car.
He opens up the door of his side,
and I climb in. I cross the bridge again,
riding in the body of my father.
Heartbreaking, honest, and above all, human—Madden’s poems move beyond parable and biography, beyond father and son. These poems are for anyone who has ever been haunted by what should have been but found solace in the hope of what could be, as he does at the end of the poem, “Prayer”:
after I have said
what I need to say to my father, whatever
that may be then, and on that morning on the lake,
may I be on the dock with my beloved,
tossing bits of biscuit to the fish, rising
from the green depths like memories—and
across the lake the sound of two geese
calling to one another.
*To purchase this title, order it from your local indie (ISBN provided above) or online at: http://www.amazon.com/Prodigal-Variations-Ed-Madden/dp/1590213408/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1301105076&sr=8-1
