Black Boat Black Water Black Sand
Dave Morrison loves his characters—their quirks and clutter, their errors and longings. He follows them into their houses, their laboratories, their two-bit convenience-store jobs. He watches a thief who hides “things/of value in the houses of/unsuspecting people.” He ponders his namesake, King David, who “sinned mightily, but he wrote the psalms,/and had a bold heart, and I imagine he was doing the/best he knew how, as who he was.” In “Black Crow,” Morrison writes, “there must be something to justify/crow’s obsessive curiosity.” Crow’s answer, and the poet’s, lifts like a breeze from this buoyant collection: the urge to dream, to imagine, to stand “on the top of a tall mast in the sun . . . until the land [falls] away . . . obsidian star, carved coal angel, heaven above, earth below.”
Dawn Potter
Author of Boy Land and Other Poems and Tracing Paradise
Morrison crafts tall poetry with an XL talent, poems that show the assessing gaze of an expert looker, poems with an all over texture, part chamois and part steel wool, with an eye for detail and the bottom line that takes language for a ride, doesn't keep it level and moving at one speed, guns it, putting it through loops and dives and steep climbs. He writes witty, often very funny poems full of simplexity—kidding and not kidding at once—as he strives to make sense of life, writing lines that free-fall through history, clutching at twigs of the long gone and the passing by to render moments of deep resonance and beauty, Every line feels cared about, really meant, subjected to crash-testing, moments of heart pulling beauty.
For Morrison the poem is a vehicle of self-exploration. If there’s an overriding theme it is that of an Everyman filled with the aspiration for recognition and personal ripening; a drive toward self-acceptance and fulfillment, always “…wondering how to shake the feeling that you're always one day late.” They acknowledge the ever present possibility of failure, filled with expressions of the child/adult agon, it’s never being quite resolved, the high cost of breaking even, how “howl won't heal the/ scar, but it helps the / bleeding, lights a match…” His poems tell us that even if life fails, it must keep trying to fail better.
Ted Bookey
author of Language as a Second Language and Lostalgia
Dave Morrison is the wisest penguin in the pit, a romantic carny who'll let you win the game if he thinks you'll give the prize to your favorite lady. From punk rock to the Maine coast, we should all age as well as he has.
Matt DiGangi
Editor thieves jargon