They Abide

Elizabeth Dougherty Dolan

Take Me Out

My father checked the stats in the Daily News, glasses askew
on his slender nose, listening to Red Barber’s southern thrum,
rich with magnolias’ scent and Mississippi raft-lollin’,
They’re tearin’ up the pea patch, the bases are F.O.B., full of Brooklyns.

I never paid much mind but there was peace in the house
those loamy summer afternoons, when you could sizzle pizza
on pavement. Mama’s noiseless laundry drooped
like willow branches from our first floor line, until one day
my father’s hardscrabble voice drowned out Red and Mel Allen
and even the cheers and groans for Bobby Thompson’s
shot heard round the world. Was it then I sensed my father
blamed my mother for my brother’s death? And so the Niagara
of words: the strikes, fouls and errors cluttered my life
as though blame could be written on a forehead.

isbn 1-59661-119-7
56 pages/$9

Liz Dolan writes about the past with an eye and ear tuned to the poetry of the ordinary, unencumbered by the sentimentality of nostalgia, but filled with the emotion made from the real ties between people and their communities, their landscapes, their times. There’s loveliness here, the gritty kind, the sparse kind and the joyous kind, too.
--Gerry LaFemina, author of The Parakeets of Brooklyn

Each poem in Liz Dolan’s first book, They Abide, stands up for itself like a sturdy Catholic schoolgirl: no pretense, no posturing. Not to say the poems are simple--not at all. These poems are the work of a skilled and deeply thoughtful poet. Dolan knows how to let a family’s history--of Ireland and the Bronx and the Delaware beaches--tell its profound and nuanced truths.
--Fleda Brown, former Poet Laureate of Delaware and author of Reunion

Elizabeth Dougherty Dolan, a four-time Pushcart nominee, received a 2009 fellowship as an established professional from the Delaware Division of the Arts. In addition, her first poetry manuscript was nominated for the Robert McGovern Prize, Ashland University. She has also been published in On the Mason-Dixon Line: An Anthology of Contemporary Delaware Writers (University of Delaware).