Poetic Voices: River Dixon and Thomas Colquith

New collections by two very different poets, River Dixon and Thomas Colquith, deal with a number of subject and ideas, but I found myself pairing them together with how they explore the similar and related themes of regret and loss. To be sure, they deal with different types of regret and loss, and they deal with them in very different ways – Dixon with a what-might-have-been approach and Colquith with a more hopeful understanding. But both express a depth of feeling, and sometimes raw emotion and pain, that are gripping and almost riveting. 

The differences between the two poets are obvious. Dixon writes in free verse; Colquith is more formalist but employs free verse as well. Dixon’s poems tend to be shorter and almost journalistic, pared down to essentials. Colquith’s poems also tell stories but add more description and detail. Dixon often forgoes punctuation; Colquith does not. Dixon sometimes writes poems in all lower-case; Colquith is more conventional with capitalization. 

 

The similarities between the two are in the themes and the emotions their poems evoke.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: River Dixon and “Lost in the Hours”

A dreamlike quality permeates the poems of Lost in the Hours, the new collection by River Dixon. The poems mirror the images and ideas that come with telling and recalling stories, introspection, self-reflection, musing, and daydreaming. The images are those that come to you while you stare out of the window in a snowy winter’s day, or as you allow yourself to float on a lake on a warm summer’s day. And as you dream, the unexpected happens – the gaining of clarity. 

Dixon writes of a letter received and imagined to be from a former love. The envelope is placed in a drawer, unopened, representing the letter never sent. He considers what happens when you realize that life is very daily, and usually repetitive. Loves are lost, and sometimes regained. Failure is imagined as a clean shovel. He recognizes hope, or perhaps control or understanding, when a lot of life concerns waiting. And he writes about pain, and memory, and loss, and love.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

"The Smell of Cedar" by River Dixon

No one deserves a customer like Sarah. No one deserves a neighbor like Sarah. No one deserves a co-worker like Sarah. No need to mention friends, because Sarah doesn’t have any.

When Sarah was a child in school, she was called out of class during a math exam. A policeman was waiting. It seems Sarah’s mother had killed the mailman. Sarah gets no additional explanation, but she is sent to live with her grandmother.

No one deserves a grandmother like Sarah’s. We understand why Sarah’s mother did what she did. And we understand why Sarah became the person she did. The grandmother taught Sarah to suppress all of her feelings, trust no one, never cry or show any sign of weakness. And to teach her, she has the cedar box.

River Dixon

The Smell of Cedar, a novella by River Dixon, lures the reader into the story with what seems like a tale about the secrets a cedar box can tell. And it does have secrets, including how it turns children like Sarah into homicidal psychopaths.

Like I said, no one deserves a grandmother like Sarah’s.

Dixon is a poet and short story writer who’s published five books, including Left Waiting and Other Poems, Colder: A Collection of Poetry and Prose, The Stories in Between, and Beyond the Field: An Illustrated Short Story. He’s also contributed stories to two volumes of the anthology Static Dreams: A Dark Anthology from Twisted Minds. He lives with his family in Arizona.

Dixon writes dark stories, and The Smell of Cedar is certainly that. (I’ve read his poetry, and he does not write dark poems about homicidal maniacs.) It’s a mesmerizing tale, with a few graphic scenes, requiring frequent setting aside to catch your breath. 

Related:

Poets and Poems: River Dixon and “Left Waiting.”

Poets and Poems: River Dixon and "Left Waiting"

Time is our greatest asset, poet River Dixon writes in the introduction to his poetry collection Left Waiting: And Other Poems. It can be painful, unforgiving, and indifferent, he says. Squandering it can be devastating. “But time also gives us those moments when we can step back, put down the load we carry and recognize that there is something more at work here than what we can define. It’s these moments that we find another precious commodity: words.” 

Time and words are themes running through Left Waiting. There is a sense of time fading, like the dying rays of the sun and like what happens when as we age, and decades seem to pass increasingly faster. Where did the time go? How did the children grow up so quickly? I blinked and the four-year-old was graduating from college.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.