Jim Churchill-Dicks' poetry collection Wine-Dark Mother and the Trapper's Son witnesses the explosive landscapes of fractured families with a level gaze as tender as it is reckoning. The ill-loved child craves reconciliation the adults around them are not equipped to provide; these poems excavate the journey into adulthood that requires each of us to reconcile with ourselves and our fractured hist
ories when it is already too late. The mother, observed asleep: "Is she dead?" …"Do not wake up./This is who you/want to be. The father, "peeling his orange flight-suit halfway down, a snake shedding skin…'I lost him,' …'My boy has augured in'…intermittent streetlights staining his warm, wet face." Tectonic violence jerks the ground under these poems. Recurring images of smoke, ash, volcanic eruptions, and what we see in the plumes create an ominous and contested beauty: "Spirit, what do you want?/What do you want me to know/among these yellow leaves?" contrasts with hollow despair: "That plume is a woman/who just couldn't take any more—"
As the collection progresses, the images begin to cohere into a larger skyscape of un-easy forgiveness. There are no shortcuts here, no platitudes in place of real integration: "Whatever we say no to/comes back and sticks/to us a little bit" … "And herein lies the revocation,/the cancellation of the debt". In the final piece of the collection, "Farewell Poem to a Living Father," Churchill-Dicks closes the journey precisely where and how it must be closed: "take this folded paper/and give it to the boatman/when he asks you/if you were loved." Few writers have either the courage or the capacity for specificity that is required to tell the complex truth of a family's immense cruelties, or its fragile loves. In Wine-Dark Mother and the Trapper's Son, Churchill-Dicks reminds us of the fact that in Jewish tradition, witness is an active verb; a difficult praxis and a real action toward reconstituting the world and making whole what was scattered. In these poems' reconstitution of memory, soul, and family, we are enabled to more fiercely and truly witness our own.
- Jessamyn Smyth, author of The Inugami Mochi and Kitsune
