Family Portrait with Scythe: Poems

by James Owens

James Owens' stunning valediction, both for and forbidding mourning, slices with steely memory to the "wet bone." Stumbling with a boy's "ignorant gravity," Owens cannot right the "unbalanced accounts" of his miner father's sooty lungs, his parents' exhausted marriage--nor his own professed failings. Yet his keen eye in and of the natural world does lead to the scales balanced, if precariously--in belonging "on the brief earth," in parsing spring from grief, in "the good story of the body" whose light becomes "the shine of spirit." A master poet works this crescent blade, a master who embraces life's whole catastrophe as equally as he farewells it past.

--Linda Parsons, author of This Shaky Earth

114 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2020

Reviews

[Ethan Birch · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I have a wrinkled photograph of him as a boy,
before his wives and many years before me,
where he faces the world with an uncomplicated look,
nothing to forgive. I'm old enough to be his father,
so I'd hold that yet unharrowed body, gather
him unembarrassed in my arms, and rock."

I measure the greatness of a poetry collection by its most memorable stanza, and this one in particular has never left my thoughts. Two words: uncomplicated, unembarrassed. Gah. My heart weeps at their simple and apologetic nature.

The drama of Owens poetry is incredible and sticky. Similes like "soft as the inside of an eyelid" resonate with something so bygone and fatherly.

These poems make me want to hold out a handful of browse and watch as the poems come forward, deer-like, to nourish themselves. To look at me as I look at them. With their own frailty and their own power.