Good Ash: Poems
by Kika Dorsey
38 Poems ~ 87 pages
Price: $20.00
Publisher: Pinyon Publishing
ISBN: 979-8-9916083-0-5
To Order: Pinyon Publishing or Amazon.com
Reviewed by Michael Escoubas
The words of poet Elizabeth Strauss Friedman come close to capturing this reviewer’s response to Kika Dorsey’s latest collection. Friedman writes, “Good Ash had me putting on my sweater believing I was cold and then realizing it was goosebumps from the line-by-line beauty her poems rained down on my spine tingled soul.”
A quick read of Dorsey’s Foreword put me in harness to read the whole. This transparent self-introduction reveals how her life was influenced by her mother, a Jungian psychologist, and her father who committed suicide. As if these twin influences were not enough to sustain her writing efforts, Dorsey explores “the intersection between myself and the natural world.” She delves into various feminist themes and reveals the life-sustaining connections with family and friends. All of these have, over time, shaped and sculpted her life. Your reviewer’s sense is that poetry has been the sculptor’s chisel, shaping the life of this profoundly gifted poet.
Good Ash is organized into four parts. Part 1 features her parental relationships. Part 2 focuses on the intersection between the poet and the natural world. In Part 3 Dorsey reveals what she means by “Good Ash.” Part 4 studies feminist themes including the “truly miraculous nature of our bodies.”
Stylistically, Dorsey writes in a narrative style. Her work is conversational, open, and welcoming. She is humble and grateful for the life she has been given. Although the hand of fate has not always been kind, she responds with grace and courage.
These excerpts from “My Father’s Ghost,” lift (partially) the curtain on a complicated relationship:
1
No written ghost can rhyme, can compose music out of letters. They can’t inhabit themselves with bone, but they can walk through doors, whether you open them or not.
3
I have my own treasure chest I never bury and rarely open. In it lies a string of pearls he gave me when I was thirty, when said to me, now you are surely a woman, and leaned toward by clavicle bones and clasped the pearls around my neck. Now the skies of his gifts are blackening, so I wait out their storm to wear those scars again.
“My Willow,” (Part 2) brings Dorsey’s profoundly spiritual tendencies into play:
My willow, like me,
has turned every sentence into questions,
older now, with four trunks leaning and torn,
propped up with a wedge of wood
to save the bees living in its hollow.
It wonders how the canopy can touch ground,
how to collapse toward root.
It is your silence love,
how the bark with lines
enter us in our own canopy,
lines like wind-roads
into this neighborhood
of not knowing,
though we hold it in our memory
like its shade,
like its tire swing shaped like a horse
we’ve given away to children,
or the tree house we took down,
nails jammed into it dislodged.
We sawed off the branches,
brittle and precarious and leaning
into our safe street.
Its forgiveness stood so close to me.
Touch me.
(You won’t want to miss the gentle closure revealed in the last two stanzas.)
I noted above that Kika Dorsey’s poems send shivers up and down my spine. I found myself pausing at various poems just to think in more depth about their meaning. The mysterious “My Girlfriends,” was among those that kept me going back:
They have hips
made of sugar
with feet of roots
and a piercing light
in their third eye.
They trap mice
in homes built for them
and every child
they may or may not
drop from them
and they hold the world
in their hands
like marbles for a game
they will surely win.
My girlfriends invent gardens
and echo forgiveness
from a god living behind
his caged stars.
They grasp diminishing light
and let it leave behind
a future the men calculated.
My girlfriends know
the future is in the cards
and the cards are royalty
and no one will bury them
without a grail of gold.
My girlfriends are vixen and deer,
viper and hound.
They live in the wild wood
of incarnation,
in their cave
where the light of fire shines,
the shadows dance
where nothing is illusion,
and silhouettes come to life.
They are birds
and the picture of birds,
hope and the rope
of arms that bind it,
fallen rings behind good ash,
a fathomless song in the dark.
Kika Dorsey’s poetry has helped this reviewer find fresh perspectives on life. Out of the ashes of youth trauma, coupled with an array of sufferings and disappointments, Kika rises, with poetic shouts of triumph, standing in the Good Ash of life.
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