Candle-Ends: Reviews
Shelley Carpenter

Two Towns Over by Darren C. Demaree

I’ve had the true pleasure to review Darren Demaree’s poetry over the years and his impressive collection Two Towns Over (Trio House Press, 2017) is one of his very best.

I especially enjoy reading his poems because they make me think. I always feel a little smarter after I swallow a poem with my morning coffee. I am no writer of poetry, but a humble reader. I’ve discovered in my time that the reader doesn’t have to be a poet to enjoy the form. That a poem isn’t about me, but in reality, it’s all about me, the reader. A poem is a personal. A poem is also a puzzle. And I so love holding on to the poet’s words for a little while, to look for and find meaning within its form, to gently poke at its construct, and sometimes make a personal connection.

Demaree’s prose speaks to this idea. His writing is thoughtful and elegant in its vernacular and unique style that I’ve come to recognize and expect. The subjects often transcend the poet’s world and speak to a wide audience, which is another hallmark of Demaree’s writing. The collection spoke to me quite strongly, and I think it will speak to many others. It is brave, political, and disturbing—no surprise. Two Towns Over takes the reader down deep into one of America’s darkest places, the living nightmare of the opiate epidemic, a real-life monster that Demaree names and calls out, pointing a finger with his prose at the ignorance and the static that fuel it.

These are some of my favorites:

Unless It’s My Own

I have seen
Mount Vernon
poorly spent

& I have heard
no talk about
Mount Vernon

& I am told
about Fredericktown
& Danville

all of the time.
The whole county
is on fire

& we’re arguing
about which
town uses

the least gasoline?
These drugs
are cheap

& they are magic
& it’s all happening
somewhere else?

No. That heat
doesn’t respond
to piss

& it’s already caught
the bottom
of your pant leg.

The poems are uniquely centered in the author’s home state of Ohio, a familiar subject in Demaree’s writing, but honestly, they could be about anywhere in the United States. Heroin has invaded every corner in every city, town, suburb in the United States as it is bought and sold in plain sight in and around Main Street, in a transforming trajectory that often leads home. Home is where the heart is and Demaree’s prose takes us there. Vividly. The poems are about the author’s world—the seen and the unseen—but they are also about our world, too.

Quick Root

Some plunges are wings
melting into the good black dirt
& feeding that dirt

With the un-writing
of a person’s book. Tongues
working past the failing bloom,

the drugs can subtract
you forever. They are taking
all of Ohio. It’s a burial

of the living. It’s the best
of us leeched to be lost
in the slight pull of gravity

& the claim each ounce
of each drug is making
on our once reminiscent flight.

If my math is correct, the collection contains 57 poems. The poems are organized in four groupings beginning with the Sweet Wolf poems that are fixed mainly in the addict’s world. The town poems, whose titles are actual townships in Ohio, are interestingly interspersed with more personal poems from the author’s and addict’s points of view. And lastly are the odes to specific drug houses, which are also named places. These titles alone are thought-provoking in their context and in their number.

This poem spoke to me. It is familiar. It could be my town that Demaree writes about. Really anyone’s town. Small town America, but a twisted America reminiscent of the setting of a Stephen King horror story where something sinister has moved into the neighborhood and is feeding off the local population. People start dying and disappearing, especially the young, and there is nothing to do but carry on. The static is deafening even under the bright Friday night football lights.

Danville, Ohio

Some nothings
Are everything
& those moving

& robed communities
Stay waist-deep
In the generations

& when one, two,
three, four, five
children die

like characters
in a newspaper story,
the crosswinds

give up completely.
The brownies cool
all on their own.

The football games
get louder
because they must.

In the poem, “Sweet Wolf #4,” Demaree writes “the real power / is undressed / inside of us, / because that’s / how actual / monsters operate.” The Sweet Wolf poems capture this truth quite viscerally. The invisible enemy within. And the wolf is so sickly sweet. How else could it attract so many? Nobody dreams of growing up to be poor, homeless, a criminal, a drug addict. Demaree’s point of view often shifts as he continues to show the subject’s vantage point in dazzling psychedelic imagery, sometimes from the ground up.

This poem made me wonder about how many people made it home and were saved and how many more were so close to hope.

Sweet Wolf #25

The home
& the temple
are quite modest.

if you’re passed
out on the steps
that reach them.

Besides the bitter poignancy, some of the Sweet Wolf poems also gave me the chills. Especially this one that flashes the monster’s face and with it the overwhelming gravity of it all.

Sweet Wolf #12

Gestures to a mask,
did you know that if you
connect the location

of every drug-house
in the Knox County area
you will see my face?

The poem, “Jefferson Township, Ohio” explores the arc of the internal invasion and its devastation to communities in a simple, yet elegant elegy composed of pure metaphor.

The bees are here.
They’re in our veins.
We are the hive,

because we have
mislabeled the honey.
We’ve tasted too little

& we’ve tasted too much
& since we cannot
trust the beekeepers,

we have the whole
countryside to ruin
with our stingers.

Two Towns Over is an audacious and brave collection of poems filled with powerful, yet beautiful, poignancy and angst about the new American condition—communities such as those in Ohio that are currently being decimated by an insidious cycle of drugs that is gaining momentum coast to coast—and its devastating collateral damage to America’s heart and soul. Darren Demaree’s words fly high like a siren screaming to the mainstream static that this assault on what we hold dearest is not coming soon to cities and towns across America. It’s already here.

*

Darren C. Demaree is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently Bombing the Thinker, which was published by Backlash Press. He is recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He lives in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

Shelley Carpenter is TC’s Reviews Editor. Email: harpspeed[at]toasted-cheese.com

Candle-Ends: Reviews
Shelley Carpenter

A Fire Without Light by Darren C. Demaree

Darren C. Demaree’s timely collection of poems in his latest book, A Fire Without Light (Nixes Mate Books, 2017) is brave, empathetic, and soulful. The poems shine a bold and searing light into the universe of Trump America. The poems were a surprise to me because they are very different from the other collections I have read and reviewed. They were also very exciting to read—an honest, poignant reaction to the political aftermath of an election that for many Americans felt surreal and unbelievable. In fact, my first thoughts were of George Orwell and his dystopian prose.

Demaree’s collection filled me with wonder. There were moments that took my breath away—and still do as I still ponder the poet’s prose during my daily ride to work as I drive by this one giant blue Trump election sign still intact and seemingly weathering its open, wild, and wintry environment quite well. My imagination takes over and I wonder: Has it been replaced since the election? Its message certainly seems appropriate to date.

Also noteworthy is structure. I liked the structure of the collection. The poems have the same title as the front cover, but slightly differ with the addition of numbers and are interestingly not in numerical order. The first poem begins with #3 and the last ends with #702. More than seven hundred poems composed about one subject. Wow! I wondered about that and then about the order, but was soon distracted by their content.

“A Fire Without Light #10” immediately caught my attention as it evocatively addresses a fire as it burns through a forest:

Blunt limbs, refusing to bloom, refusing to be kissed
by the wind, you hold no webbing to catch my heart.

I came to a full stop when I finished and quietly shuddered as I turned the page. Number 10 disturbs me now as I look out my own sunny window to the surrounding pines and wonder about that burning forest, what or whom the fire truly is, and if there may be any trees left in four years.

In “A Fire Without Light #4,” I returned to thoughts of alternate universes and dark places of the twentieth century:

Imagine the outcome is camps. Imagine the outcome is
walls around those camps. Imagine the outcome is love
shredded by barbwire around those camps. Imagine a
fire without light consuming all of us that do not see
the light and cannot lie about seeing the light. Imagine
I could escape. Imagine I choose not to. I know what
happens in a world like this. I did not think I would
have to stop imagining it.

Yet, among some of the disturbing ideas and imagery there is a beauty that transcends. A beauty in metaphor that Demaree brings to the surface in that earthy way of his that evokes such response in me:

“A Fire Without Light #325”

Bark and saw, I read the phrase “peaceful ethnic cleans-
ing” today, and I lost my posture for a second.  I crawled
into my own heart and I died for a second. I went into
the basement to look at all of my own secrets that I
always manage to metaphor into something awake yet
still hidden, and I pulled them down around me…

I know that place the poet speaks of and from. I went there, too, for a moment as I read and reread those beautiful words and thought from the private chambers in my own heart. I remembered the long-ago places I used to go and their keepsakes that only I know. And I felt safe, untouched. And I wondered if one day I might discover an inedible truth and die there, too. The poem continued to speak to me:

I had to remove whole parts of my person to live
in the world I wanted to…

I ached as I read this line. I thought about the words. I thought about the poet, his pain and his message, and the people he speaks of. Americans who are Americans but not Americans (on paper). It hurt.

“A Fire Without Light #86”

There are dead men still running on anger
and racism. There are dead women kept on budgets by
those angry and fearful men. We have universities, but
nobody thinks about islands when they live in a land
without tides…

The words are meaningful, timely. And again I think about how they could also have been written a hundred years ago and have an equal effect. There is light in Demaree’s prose as well, as he also speaks about a return to normal and hope:

“A Fire Without Light #23”

We don’t need more light. We need to breathe. We need
our leaders to not be dragons. Wrong. We’re all dragons
now. We need to learn what to do with all this fire. We
need to secure the safe places.

 

“A Fire Without Light #40”

Timelessness isn’t a thing. Everything ends. Even the
memory of the end will be lost immediately.
What we hold is a small burning. The hope is that there
is enough light to see each other’s faces through the
heat, the smoke, and the vernacular of the elements.
I don’t see anyone right now, but that doesn’t mean this
moment is over. That isn’t what it means at all.

Darren C. Demaree’s  A Fire Without Light is about borders and division in this country. The collection is a kaleidoscope of earthy-political images that mirror the startling 2016 election, the chaos and civil unrest of this presidency that is America today. Demaree speaks directly to the why and wonder of it all.

*

Darren C. Demaree is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently, A Fire Without Light (2017, Nixes Mate Books). His eighth collection Two Towns Over was recently selected the winner of the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and is due out March 2018. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

Shelley Carpenter is TC’s Reviews Editor. Email: harpspeed[at]toasted-cheese.com

Candle-Ends: Reviews
Shelley Carpenter

Not For Art Nor Prayer by Darren C. Demaree

I had the pleasure of reviewing a second and recent collection of Darren Demaree’s poetry titled, Not For Art Nor Prayer (8th House Publishing, 2015). The poems are structured in four categories with the first two parts being an existential and eclectic mix of adorations and adulations addressed to a milieu of real people on various subjects. They are followed by the Wednesday Morning numbered poems created on or about that particular day of the week and the collection concludes with the eternal odes to Emily that also appear in different forms in other collections by Demaree.

The “Adorations” were my favorite. The titles were numbered and varied. And I liked how they were tributes to friends, acquaintances and strangers. I especially like the poems addressed to strangers. I felt a sort of kinship with the poet as he described common people doing common things that most people can relate to doing or watching in progress—voyeurism, more or less. I admit it: I’m a people watcher. Here’s one I liked. I think I might have been there.

Adoration #90

for the manager at the Krogers

Yes, I saw, in fact I read it
out-loud to my daughter that we
we’re not supposed to ride inside

the cart, but with my son sitting
under buckle, we had no choice,
but to chance that she might, at some

point, stand up to reach for pancake
mix. The running and singing was
my fault. We were having such fun.

Other poems are not such visual eye-candy to me. Some I have no clue what they are about, but I like just the same. I like Demaree’s word choice and I like how the choices are gradients, words that belong on the far side of their spectrum of their meaning or that they are in an original, intriguing context such as the many comparisons and metaphors he creates. I’m no poet, but I know what I like. Here’s one with dueling images and sounds.

Water Always Leaves the Knife

For Tuscaloosa

How the chip
& hammer,
so paused in both,

that we live with the carry
& away
of that sun sum

of what fingers do
when it’s char
or the painted red faces

of about, of about
the town. Rats,
lost scorpions,

the full ribs
of such beauty
is blood, is fat, is ship.

I wrote in my annotation that I had no idea what this poem was about. It was like a secret. And I don’t think I’m far from the truth. I had the pleasure of meeting Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky a few summers back at Boston University’s Favorite Poem Project. I recall Pinsky reminding the audience that poetry is meant to be spoken. He also said in so many words that you do not have to understand the poem to appreciate it. You don’t have to take it apart to enjoy its essence. (And yes. I shared a favorite poem.)

Here’s another of Demaree’s poems I especially like:

Emily as the Cicada’s Song Crests

That sound, that was never there
before has now always been there
& if that sound is about to fade,
to grind deeper into the ground
of my subconscious, to the place
where I’ve left my almost children
& my almost arrests, the littered
moments where I was almost
a monster, will I be able to remember
the lovely things Emily said to me,
when we had to be louder than
a million magic bugs, singing their
only song, without waver? I will
know Emily as the woman next
to me, and I will love her for that.

I would have to literally dissect the poem to say why exactly I liked it aside from its natural imagery. Keeping with Mr. Pinsky’s philosophy, I think that to do so would be like pulling the wings off a butterfly to see how it flies. Instead, I will say that I like the way the words in the poem sound when I read the poem aloud, their alliteration and consonance sounds, how they float in the air for a moment, stirring and wonderful as the words take form and meaning deep inside me. Vocal-candy.

Pinsky in his book The Sounds of Poetry also discusses the idea of “the human body as the medium of poetry … how the reader’s breath and hearing embody the poet’s words,” as well as the idea that poetry is the keeper of memory, that it is an immortal medium for expressing ideas and feelings swiftly and sensuously, and most profoundly meant to be shared with the deceased as well as future generations. It gives me the chills. Demaree’s poems contain this ideology in their lovely and sensuous details. The subjects are an organic blending of bodies and images from nature and beyond, full of desire and soul. Demaree creates infinite worlds visually and vocally using his art and the human breath as his medium.

*

Darren C. Demaree is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Nineteen Steps Between Us (After the Pause Press, 2016). Many of the poems have appeared in Toasted Cheese and numerous journals and magazines. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He lives in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

Shelley Carpenter is TC’s Reviews Editor. Email: harpspeed[at]toasted-cheese.com

Candle-Ends: Reviews
Shelley Carpenter

As We Refer to Our Bodies (8th House Publishing, 2013) is a collection of poems by Darren C. Demaree, a recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations. Demaree’s poems traverse human spaces and natural places in the poet’s world—reminiscent of the metaphysical poets. Each poem is an elegy to the tangible and untouchable. Images of animals, people, and rural life are layered within a kaleidoscopic context of emotion and existentialism as the poet contemplates the big questions with swirling thoughts that reach beyond the unassailable boundaries of ocean, sky and earth.

First, they found me,

then it was proven

that I wasn’t there.
I was on the land,

then I was under
the thinnest ocean,

digging back & back
trying to outflank

the processional.

— Ohios, p. 37

The collection is organized in three sections: Directions for Leaving, Ohios, and Black & White Pictures. It is interesting that many of the poems have no titles. Is there more meaning in their absence? Does their absence relate something else, a seamless, unspeakable thought to ponder and track along the poems lines and borders?

There is lovely allusion and repetition of word. The frequent usage of the ampersand is also intriguing, perhaps suggestive of a backward glancing speaker?

                            … She’ll
dream of darkened roses
& their profound thorns.
She’ll dream shining lines
with no context & no end.
She’ll dream in orange
& mango & her lips will
quiver without knowing why.

— Black & White Pictures, p. 66

Burning is another theme that flows throughout the collection along with a strong sense of place, a searing passion for life and love and the land.

Finally, sex like a burned
corn field, raw & rough
& in the dirt, a story peppered
with the word “soiled.”

— Ohios, p. 19

The subjects of the poems are personified in gorgeous figurative language and loving metaphor. Bodies change shape and transform to and from ordinary objects, organic and manufactured, that represent more—a way of life or perhaps a longing for something or someone, and with it a sense that the poet may be lost in his own love and desire—as seen in the Emily poems.

Not as a bee, so close
to the ground, so nested
in the one, colored hive;

my love is a lunatic
with wings, a dynamo
in reds, in oranges,

— “Emily as Thousands of Colliding Butterflies” (p. 46)

There is also an ethereal feature to many of Demaree’s poems. A lingering sense like one has been traveling far in their dream. And then waking up and not fully remembering one’s dream but recalling only fragments, yet knowing the full feeling of the dream and what it meant to be in the dream: so poignant—so vivid—so alive.

There was sky where the stars had died
& each time we replaced one

the heat of falling rock would consume
us. I don’t remember the colors.
I don’t remember the weight of it.
I remember the burning, mostly.

— “Ways You Can Lose Your Heart #16” (p. 12)

Demaree’s reach stretches across the boundaries of the human heart, delving into its many fissures and secret chambers, bubbling up with sentiment and ferocity that disturbs.

Something opened its eyes when
you first did, nestled itself
next to you, in your crib & for

the rest of time will be nose-
to-nose with you, never yielding.

—Ohios, p. 23

As We Refer to Our Bodies is a stirring collection of poems that travels along the American landscape and taps the many veins of the human experience with a heroic passion and an honesty that is brutally eloquent and soulful.

*

Darren C. Demaree lives in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children. He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines and journals including Toasted Cheese. He is the author of As We Refer to Our Bodies (8th House, 2013), Temporary Champions (Main Street Rag, 2014), and Not For Art Nor Prayer (8th House, 2015). Temporary Champions is a collection of poems about the 1982 title fight between Ray Mancini and Duk Koo Kim. You can find links to more of Darren’s work on his blog and at Twitter: @d_c_demaree.

Shelley Carpenter is TC’s Reviews Editor. Email: harpspeed[at]toasted-cheese.com