Moonlight in the Redemptive Forest

$16.00

Poetry. Book with accompanying CD. Michael Daley’s MOONLIGHT IN THE REDEMPTIVE FOREST drives a stake into the heart of complacency. Its theme is war, though not warfare. From spoken and unspoken minefields in drug addled families of America, from final solutions at Auschwitz and Eastern Europe, the savage firebombing of Tokyo, the poems depict survivors and victims with compassion and, ultimately, hope.

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Poetry. Book with accompanying CD. Michael Daley’s MOONLIGHT IN THE REDEMPTIVE FOREST drives a stake into the heart of complacency. Its theme is war, though not warfare. From spoken and unspoken minefields in drug addled families of America, from final solutions at Auschwitz and Eastern Europe, the savage firebombing of Tokyo, the poems depict survivors and victims with compassion and, ultimately, hope. Its longest poem evokes in narrative form a legend from Daley’s South Boston Irish heritage, where poverty and suspicion overshadowed innocence. These poems should be heard—a CD, with music by Brad Killion, comes with the book—and savored for their crisp and daring language; not paeans to the virtuous triumphant, these are songs of the wounded who sing in their chains. (Currently out of stock)

 

“…A beautiful poem called “On Air,” which provides glimpses into several biographies, changes scene and character abruptly in the manner of “The Wasteland.” (Daley borrows even more obviously from Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” in “The Daughter’s Tale” which repeats the “Because” opening throughout; also in the obvious spoof, “La Figlia Che Concupisce…”) At any rate, “On Air” begins with the child awakening at his grandmother’s house:

<em>“Lit dew haloes my curtain.”</em> The Second World War is raging and his father bluffs his way into the air force (reiterating the theme of air). Then it’s 1961 and the boy is living with his uncle Danny Donovan, a fisherman, who regales the young man with homespun philosophy: <em>“He said,/ now I shall live to see what no one in the last decade…could live to believe.”</em> In the next section, the narrator, having “lost my faith in air,” takes to riding the rails, meeting strange characters and having unsettling dreams and many dream-like experiences.

<em>where was it? Reno? Albuquerque?—
when one of Jesus’ shoeless boys sang on the night air,
and walked the desert calling all us drifters?</em>

We get a last look at his grandmother <em>“…waving on the porch she rides/ past Jupiter and Venus.”</em> And we close as the father, standing in the cockpit of a warplane over the Aleutians, exults in his freedom:

<em>you leaned into the ear of the pilot a low
whistle, a sigh, a breath, laughing on the air.</em>

Hopefully the foregoing is sufficient to give the reader some of the flavor of this highly idiosyncratic poet. There are many poems that sing the sensations of childhood. There are several long poems such as “Teacup & Cookie” or “Frankie The Milkman’s Song,” which contain a wealth of images, experiences and human emotions that are well worth close study, but present deeper complexity than can be examined in a short review. I can confidently recommend <em>Moonlight in the Redemptive Forest</em> as both a notable instance of postmodern style and an extraordinarily rich quarry of poetic invention.” –Martin Abramson, Book/Mark Quarterly Review, Spring 2011 

 

Michael Daley was born in Boston, and is a graduate of UMass with an MFA from the University of Washington. He’s worked as a laborer, taxi driver, waiter, tree-planter, editor, Poet-in-the-schools, and high school English teacher. The author of three books of poems, a book of essays and several chapbooks, his work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Manoa, Alaskan Quarterly Review, Nebraska Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, Raven Chronicles, Seattle Review, and on Garrison Keilor’s Writer’s Almanac. In 2001 he received a Fulbright grant to live in Hungary for a year. Twice the National Endowment of the Humanities has awarded his work, as has the Seattle Arts Commission, Bumbershoot, and the Fessenden Foundation. He received a grant from Artists Trust to produce the book MOONLIGHT IN THE REDEMPTIVE FOREST’s accompanying CD, “Frankie the Milkman’s Song & Other Poems.” For more on Michael Daley: https://www.pw.org/content/michael_daley



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