Before Kodachrome

by Don Schofield

Set in Fresno, the Sierra Nevadas and Greece, the poems in Before Kodachrome look back unflinchingly at a fractured California childhood in the 1950s and ‘60s. In the process they lay out in stark contrast the dimensions of a life where parents, real and surrogate, are at once loving and violent, attentive and neglectful, righteous and morally bankrupt. From his adopted homeland, the cradle of Western civilization, the poet weaves stories from classical mythology, the Old Testament, fairy tales and popular American culture that show how a balanced adult self can be formed, not by avoiding childhood trauma and insistently “moving on,” but by using language and narrative to delve deep into one’s past and bring back artifacts that provide meaning, stability and, yes, at times, transcendence.

Genres: Poetry

74 pages, Paperback

First published September 19, 2012

Reviews

[Sharman Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t think of it as “disclosure” to say that I knew Don Schofield when he was a young poet, and I was a young fiction writer, and we were both getting our MFAs at the University of Montana in Missoula. Halcyon days! Don and I co-edited the literary magazine CutBank together, and in some ways he introduced me to poetry. I hadn’t read too much before (saving, obsessively, “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman) and I don’t read enough now, but I did love and appreciate Don’s work from the start. Because his poems were so personal. Because they were so autobiographical. Because they evoked childhood and a childhood in a very specific place so well. In a way, these poems were like a hyper lyrical compressed form of memoir or creative nonfiction. Later I began to write creative nonfiction and the personal essay, and perhaps the memory of Don’s poems encouraged me—to try and be as intimate, as vulnerable, and as lyrical as he was.

Some thirty-five years later, long after I graduated with that MFA from the University of Montana, I am reading Don’s collection of poems Before Kodachrome and marveling both at how far he has come in his poetic powers and how close he has stayed, in these poems, to the heart of those early themes: childhood, fathers, California, loss, celebration. Once again, I feel as if I am reading his life and entering into his being. What a privilege. And, surely, the very reason we read!

[FutureCycle Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:


BEFORE KODACHROME

I love this snapshot of the boy
posing in his Sunday best—white

trousers, sweater, even his hair
seems white. He’s looking down

at the lawn deep in shadow, smiling
in light so bright it almost

washes him out.
And this one of his room:

Davey Crockett curtains,
Superman bedspread, Apache war bonnet

on the wall. A patch of light
is spreading over his face and arms;

ample darkness, though,
behind the door,

under the bed, surrounding
legs and feet. In that dreamy silence

before the others woke,
he’s caught between two oblivions,

looking up from his bed, smiling,
in light so bright he’s almost

not there.



2619 VAN NESS BLVD

Even then, 1957,
that house was crumbling,
plaster falling from its ceiling
like pages from a book. Yet here,

in this photo on the front lawn, it’s Sunday,
I’m eight years old forever,
arms around that mother
hard and straight as a door.
House, was it you I loved?

If I could know just half your thoughts,
feel your long-gone warmth
like the ivy climbing your walls…
House that towers in memory, strong
and beautiful, you who saw us fall
from love, that world come unhinged, tell me,

was it her despair or yours,
the swamp-cooler’s mournful drone?
the cuckoo’s insistent, oracular song?
the brooding of ballerinas
on her disheveled dresser

as all along your papered walls
that horse and carriage raced headlong
into a darkening forest? —Oh, House,
hold on, so I can,

to Sunday, to love, to 1957,
that bright grey lawn.