I can’t sleep
without the ocean
hushing in my ears.
My daughter tells me this,
midnight, her tiny silhouette
in the doorway to our bedroom.
Go back to bed, sweety I finally say,
remembering that my wife
is back on third shift.
I can’t sleep either,
not in this bed,
not without the numbness,
not without the dull hum
of the drill press
resonating in my bones.
Tomorrow I’ll punch in again.
The alarm is set for six.
The man I became on the beach,
the man who studied the insides
of a washed-up jellyfish
for nearly an hour,
the man who finishes sentences
with sweety,
will lie down
for me to bore holes through,
one after another after a thousand
until there’s nothing left,
until, in a few weeks,
I’ll be able to sleep again
like the dead.
isbn 1-59661-078-6
88 pages/$15
In this collection of selected and new poems, Jeff Vande Zande writes from the landscapes of deserted highways after midnight, basements full of family secrets, and backyards where the interplay of father and son become the ties that bind them together. He finds again and again that the true value of human experience, the daily act of living and loving these essential bits of Heaven here on earth in a world simultaneously becoming present and absent, lies in the small, decisive actions we take to honor and love it. In this way, Vande Zande is a pragmatist in the face of existence and annihilation. His poetry—a tight music borne out of silence that becomes responsive to the small details that ignite consciousness—proves over and over again that to survive is to be present and useful in the face of transience. What I like about these poems is their refusal to blink away at the impotence, loss, beauty and gratitude that we feel in the face of what is loveable and losable—whether it is a scattering of birds, a dead father, a stretch of mysterious blacktop, a wife, or a newborn child. In one early poem titled “Up into the Light” Vande Zande writes “everything seems to be flickering, a candle losing oxygen,” and in another, called “Survival Tactics,” he answers, “The fire the men kindled now owns them—it's the only way they know to hold off the darkness.” In a recent poem about marriage, Vande Zande further develops his vision when he writes that “every union dangles from a small hook, tries to fill the emptiness of coffee cups, to make a true line that holds everything together.” In these selected poems, some about the homesickness of driving alone at night, some that address the enchantments and concomitant threats implicit in the commitment to love another person, and some that celebrate the healing joys of fatherhood, Vande Zande asserts again and again that the one true line that holds everything together in a world of darkness, transience and possibility, is love.
—Ken Meisel,
author of Sometimes the Wind;
Before Exiting; and Just Listening
In these carved and crafted out of hardscrabble poems, Jeff Vande Zande makes seamless the natural world and the worlds constructed by the human. He is our Virgil leading us through the daily grinding down of our hearts, through the realization that the violence and splendor of the outside world has its inner equivalent.
—Jack Ridl
The poems…display an intense scrutiny and attention to the small shifts in the wind that signal love, or disaster. Their tough, tight music sings with both hope and despair, both acceptance and doubt. The subtle grace of these poems illuminates the darkness beneath the surface of these lives, and all our lives.
—Jim Daniels
Thank you to the editors of the following magazines in which some of these poems first appeared:
Asphodel, Birmingham Poetry Review, Blue Collar Review, The Bridge, Controlled Burn, Crab Creek Review, Fugue, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Karamu, Main Street Rag, Midwest Poetry Review, New American Imagist, The Oakland Journal, Parting Gifts, Passages North, Pearl, Rattle, Remark, River Oak Review, and Sulphur River Literary Review.
College English “She Chose to Wade” Copyright 1998 National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted with permission.
Poems in this collection also appeared, sometimes in different versions, in the following chapbooks: Last Name First, First Name Last (Partisan Press), Transient (March Street Press), and Tornado Warning (March Street Press).
“Blood Work” appeared in Family Matters: Poems of Our Families, an anthology by Bottom Dog Press.
“Clean” also was selected to appear in Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s nationally syndicated newspaper column, American Life in Poetry.
Cover photo by Michael Randolph.