Review of Vertebrae Rosaries, 50 Sonnets by Philip Dacey, Red Dragonfly Press (2009), 56 pp., $10, ISBN 978-1-890193-80-5. Reviewed by David Chorlton.
Following up on a previous book of sonnets (
The New York Postcard Sonnets: A Midwesterner Moves to Manhattan from Rain Mountain Press), Philip Dacey has collected fifty more poems in that form in this, his tenth full-length book. Where the New York poems thrived on observation and listening in on those around their author, these play with language as they wander into other, sometimes serious, sometimes poignant, areas.
To set a tone, the first sonnet, “Serenade,” takes an Associated Press news release to the effect that “cellar-door” was picked as the most beautiful sounding English word. “You are as beautiful as the word cellar-door” Dacey begins before pursuing a journey he couldn’t resist. By the middle of the book, sets of five and three poems respectively appear as “Postcards from Vietnam” and “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial (D.C.),” and register all the more effectively in contrast to the lightness elsewhere. In the “Whitman: The Wall” section, one line reflects the vast social upheaval brought about by that war: “Just that. America’s great reading lesson.” As good poetry always does, another of the Vietnam themed sonnets turns an abstraction into a concrete image: “The secret/ingredient is the rice in Grandfather’s bones.”
“The Mother” is another short sequence, starting out with a study in language designed to slip a cushion beneath the facts. “‘Penis’ was not a word my mother used,/preferring ‘doololly,’ its music and color,/how it trivialized the organ that had caused/her so much trouble, grief, year after year.” Finding the right word(s) for the occasion rests at the core of creativity for a poet. Dacey adopts the persona of the famous choreographer in “George Ballanchine: Centro Sonnet” to mull the comparative qualities of their art forms. “Turning out ballets is like making furniture./God invents and creates, I assemble.” he opens, moving on to the practical advice “Forget/your soul, I want to see your foot.” and ending with “Who’d ask a rose to explain/itself? I’m a dance supplier, a circus man.”
When he is serious, Philip Dacey isn’t daunting, and when he is humorous he isn’t silly, rather bringing to his work a mixture of learning and a deft touch with language. This results in some memorable observations like the nude in the first of the “Nude Quartet” saying “I want my flesh to migrate into paint,” and “I want to gather a bouquet of eyes.”
These are sonnets dusted and polished for the present day. In a word: suave.