“We Are Here and It Is Now: Poems” by Dave Morrison; Soul Finger Press, Camden, Maine, 2024; 72 pages, paperback, $12.95.
In Camden poet Dave Morrison’s world, everything has potential.
There are pitfalls to this, as some of the poems in his new collection “We Are Here and It Is Now” show. But even when things just plain go wrong, moments of ironic clarity, glimpses of beauty, memories can transform discomfort, embarrassment and pain.
An example of a bent situation that comes out funny is “Temperature,” which is about potentially debilitating worry. The speaker of the poem is explaining to his doctor that he’s been hot and sleepless, so he took his temperature, which solved nothing, so he took an aspirin and his temperature again, which turned out to still be normal. But he continued to feel “feverish and chilled” in a way that reminded him of a car crash he witnessed as a child, making him think maybe “I needed / to put my affairs in order pronto.”
… I asked the doctor what
should I do?
She looked at me for a very long time and
then said
stop
taking
your
temperature.
Similarly, “I Wonder” wonders specifically about what has potentially gone wrong. “I wonder if everything annoys me / because a series of missteps and / wrong turns have brought me to / a life that doesn’t fit because it / belongs to someone else … // My wife wonders if I should lay off the / coffee.”
In “New Guitar,” the wife wants to know why he needs a new guitar. He ponders the answer to this “fair question,” and after a harrowing reflection on humanity’s inhumanity to humanity, he describes the guitar’s potential: a “beautiful and honest tool that / will only do what we ask of it, / it is loaded with possibility and / devoid of judgment.”
“Little Bang” depicts potential in nothing at all: the making of a poem is “a brief, small flash, and from / nothing something.” In “Dimensions,” thinking of dream and eyeblink presences of lost friends and family members, he wonders about the potential that he’s unwittingly influencing others: “Do / I do and say confusing things in / other people’s dreams?” Anything is possible.
My favorite poem in the collection might be “Old Friends,” complete here:
We were feeling blue,
work-tired and done with
the rain, so we went to that
store with the good coffee and
cookies the size of a Viking
shield, and we drove down the
quiet straight roads, through the
tunnel of ancient trees and we
talked of familiar things and
we were lifted, just enough that
the rain and fog and fatigue were
not only acceptable, but old
friends, really, and we were
filled with that sense that
familiar things and simple
pleasures would continue to
save us.
This poem is about the potential of a gloomy day, of friendship, of the simplest possible routines to open up a day to salvation. This is no small accomplishment — either by emotion or by poetic creation. These lines better than any others in the collection convey the sense of the book’s title.
“We are Here and It Is Now” discloses that the potential for uplift, characteristic of all Dave Morrison’s poetry, is everywhere. The book is available from local and online book sellers.
Off Radar takes note of poetry and books with Maine connections the first Friday of each month. Contact Dana Wilde at dwilde.offradar@gmail.com.
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