Standing on My Father's Grave
John Freeman

Review by Alyce Wilson

Like an ancient shaman, John Freeman draws on the spirituality of the natural world and uses it to infuse meaning into his poetry collection, "Standing on My Father's Grave."

It's as if he takes a spirit walk into nature, using its inspiration to draw him into a deeper understanding of his personal and family history.

For example, in "Gypsy Moth" he describes a moth, who disturbs the writer's study, "soiled wings / on the lamp's milky glass."

The speaker understands those thrashings, "scraping my pencil across a white page / to reach the fire of words rubbed together." In this desperate thrashing, he sees his own strivings for love. He asks the moth, "if I could make you see / how the light would eat you alive, would you stop trying / to hurl yourself on its altar?"

In the poem "Stroke," the speaker talks about his mother, using the language of the gardens she once loved to tend.

Her room is warm as a greenhouse. I say
it's too hot in here and she nods
on the thin stalk of her neck. Her fingers trickle
softly as a light rain
down the hem of an unfinished housecoat
spread on the chair beside her

Noticing her hair is "limp and matted as oxalis," the speaker feels his "own middle-age spreading / its roots." And she "withdraws / into a brown patch of earth somewhere in her brain, / where I must leave her."

To extend this metaphor further, the collection starts by seeking out roots, starting in the mythological time of Genesis with "The Dispossed," next exploring the mysteries of space in "M-42," and coming again to earth, through the farmer of "Fencerows" and through a range of nature poems.

Intermixed with these musings are stories about a great-aunt, grandfathers, his mother, his father and his wife. And the strongest moments arrive when the deeply personal meets natural imagery.

In "Posthumous Instructions for My Wife," the speaker asks that, on the first year, she lets grief "wring your body / dry of pain." On the fifth year, she should remember him as "a song forgotten until a stray verse slips / into mind." And on the tenth year, he asks:

Dig up my bones. Lay them among rocks
in the throat of a dry river as amulets
(perhaps the water's voices will come back).
but save my ribs - fashion from their rack
a marimba, from my shinbone a flute
through which you'll breath in me an ancient music.

He uses an echo of this image at the close of the collection, in the poem, "Standing on My Father's Grave:" "Tonight I stand over your bones to draw / their residue of spirit." This way, he discovers "newfound vision."

He makes of his father's spirit one last request: "Send fire / across the dark light years that separate us -- / if only into the night sky's blackness, / walk in these steps I take away from your grave."

And with this shamanistic gesture, having connected successfully with the spirits of his forebears, Freeman's spirit walk comes to a close.

Mellen Poetry Press; ISBN: 0773434291