also parents reveling in the sentimentality of these poems, winking back at Owens knowingly. I, alas, cannot. You be the judge. ‚Sawyer Says‛ is a good example, as proud papa stitches a poem composed with snippets of his tyke’s speech. This is the verbally nimble toddler who tells her daddy, ‚You need a different job.‛ She’s the little tyro who asserts: ‚Now I know why I was sick, / because I wasn’t getting enough candy.‛ The poem ends: Sawyer says, Aren’t you glad I chose you, Daddy? When I was in Mommy’s tummy, I saw you and you looked sweet, and I knew you’d be a good Daddy, so I chose you.
The kid was right: Owens is sweet, bless his Daddy heart, but I wipe the stickiness from my fingers and thumb back to those darker poems that resonate with depth as well as candor. The book could have done without its Poetic Postscript by Anthony S. Abbott, which opens with an epigraph from Owens’ poem, ‚ The Word for What Only 4-Year Olds Can
See.‛ I don’t know who Abbott is and I don’t care. His postscript, titled ‚Effuctress,‛ is an odd scrap from another quilt. It detracts from the patterns of light and shadow that Owens has stitched in these pages. Better the book had ended on page 68 with Owens’ last lines, alternating dark and light, in ‚The Daddy Poem.‛ my only tools paper and play, pen and wipe, image and line, standing still until the past poems up inside me.
These are not lyric poems (which is my preference), nor are they rich in metaphor, nor are they musical, but there’s one element of craft that Owens has mastered: He writes a smashing last line. Thus he concludes ‚Steps,‛ a dizzying litany of parent-child activities with: The end, I suppose, was inevitable, reliving the things we knew best, how to leave, how to be left.
And in ‚Creating Small Occasions,‛ a poem about Sawyer’s ‚first steps, words, teeth,‛ he muses: ‚A life made up of small occasions / would not be so bad.‛ And this, my favorite Owens’ stitch-it-up-and-tie-it-up-neatly ending, in ‚Daughter’s Confidence,‛ a poem that takes place at ‚a pizza shop‛ where his little girl exhibits remarkable aplomb when a human in mouse costume turns his back on the 3-year-old: