Robert P. Dana published Hard Candy, a fine-press publication from Catstep Press, Iowa City, 2008. The chapbook includes 13 poems, including the following villanelle, reprinted with the master poet’s permission. The villanelle form has five stanzas of three lines and a concluding quatrain (4 lines). Here the recursive movement of the pattern is a perfect container for the recursive motion of the narrator’s memory.Going Back
Will it be like home or one foot in the grave,
when I return to my little New England town?
I live now between the mountain and the wave.
What will I lose? What will I save?
A boyhood autumn, red-gold slanting down?
Will it feel like home or one foot in the grave?
Admit it. You’ve sometimes been a slave
to memory. The girl, the dance, the gown.
We live between the mountain and the wave.
Let Rip Van Winkle once more dream and rave
in his old horse-trough by the library, his frown
hawking apples and one foot in the grave.
Mac, Ju-jic, Honey, Ruth and Dave
are gone now, into the sear and tumble-down.
We live between the mountain and the wave.
The mill run’s coppery. Wild waters don’t behave.
A fly drifts, dazzling brook trout and brown.
Does it seem like home or one foot in the grave?
I live between the mountain and the wave.
Another new publication from Dana is from Anhinga Press, The Other, a collection of poetry, available through this url: http://www.anhinga.org/books/book_info.cfm?title=Other .
Dana is about to celebrate his 80th birthday, and his writing continues to amaze me. Dana is one of the poets I study to see ways that poetry can be crafted.
