Wings Press

I recently had the pleasure of hearing Chip Dameron read selections of his poetry, including pieces from his newest collection Hook & Bloodline. This volume should gain the poet a larger audience with its profound ruminations about human existence. Dameron’s poems lead the reader to meditate on the connections between the natural world and the quiet magic of living, and they bring this meditation about so effortlessly that these acts of observation seem natural not only to the speaker, but to the reader.

One of the major themes of Hook & Bloodline is expressed in the title of the volume’s third section: Correspondences. Unlike Baudelaire, who focuses on rot and decay, Dameron observes what should happen without preaching. In "During Spring Migration," the speaker sits with other bird watchers and notes the presence of "warbles, kingbirds, buntings,/ orioles. A cuckoo," all of whom have just flown across the Gulf of Mexico to get there. Soon after, they see "a couple of agents at work among three/Mexicans sitting in the dirt." Dameron connects the two events not only to each other but to the speaker by using the word bird as a verb: "As we bird/back to our cars." Suddenly the migration, the arrest of the illegal aliens, and the observation of both are connected by a freedom each should enjoy.

Three baseball poems open the section entitled "Correspondences" and highlight the limits of science in describing human interaction in the natural world. We are shown in "Game Catch" that "The closest thing/to a lie is a moment’s/ deepest yes." The shortstop is at the center of "Night Ball" and "Relay Man." In the latter, the player is encouraged to throw the ball in such a way that, "the runner from first cannot slide/ out of his pending doom." "Night Ball" reveals that scientific language cannot detract from the moment or the connected moments where everything happens.

The observations in these poems could take on such expression as to draw attention to the emotions a reader might feel, but the power of Dameron’s poems is that he records the observations, with a minimum of emotion, and allows the reader the do the feeling. The speaker in "Fishing in Moorea" muses,

Similar to "During Spring Migration," "Tahitian Cockfighter" is about a man who has killed someone while drunk and lives with the guilt of getting away with it. In "Tree House Song," the bird’s tones are not compared to the beloved’s voice in some greeting card sentiment. Dameron writes, "you become/ the song of a bird/that has reached/what it’s been looking for." Thus, the poem’s conclusion is not only haunting and beautiful, but believable.

Hook & Bloodline is a collection of reflections that do not sit quietly on the mind of its readers. These poems provide us a sense that not only is life sometimes magical, but that sometimes we are magicians.