Poems
by Sean Thomas Dougherty
American
Poets Continuum Series
Sean
Thomas Dougherty was raised in an interracial family with an
African-American step-father, and a mother whose grandparents
were Jewish immigrants from Budapest and the Ukraine. Issues
of identity and the complexities of history are central in his
work. In Broken Hallelujahs, Dougherty uses a variety
of experimental and traditional forms including canzone, prose
poem, metered and elliptical poems. These aesthetic devices
structure his themes of personal and historical fissure and
the reconnection of such fissures.
American and African-American
musical poems push against a narrative describing Dougherty's
journey to Budapest to walk the streets of his great grandmother.
As his multiple ancestries are interwoven across time and space,
Dougherty's family, the power of memory, and the need to not
forget in the face of historical atrocity, provide a safe passageway,
to "Sing across time and space the names of our living,
and our dead."
"The poems of
Sean Thomas Dougherty are full of intelligence and energy, myth
and music, moving in surreal, jagged streams. There is a remarkable
range of references here, from Edith Piaf to Biggie Smalls,
from Jackson Pollock to Killer Kowalski. Above all, however,
there is empathy, that essential element of poetry and humanity,
for a dying grandfather, for the insomniacs of the city, for
all the forgotten histories the poet cannot forget. To him I
say: Keep singing."
--Martín Espada
“Sean Thomas Dougherty writes urgent and voracious poetry. His enthusiasms are infectious. Fortunately, veracity is constant too— in melodic images, some of which shadow each other throughout the poems, and in untypical tributes to family icons and icons of influence. Small worlds become major too, sometimes in just a stroke: ‘The insomnia of the doll’s open eyes, out in the alleyway’s trash.’ Or when ‘A girl sharpens a blade against a curb.’ Broken Hallelujahs is an exciting and important book of poetry.”
—Michael Burkard
The
Sky Inside
My
grandfather's hand opens and there is a sky inside. The sky
is blue above the hay fields of Western Hungary. It is the Uzhgorod
sky. Inside the field of my grandfather's palm is a tiny hay
cart, pulled by a slow paced mare, with white tipped tail, a
woman with a red babushka gathering (some indigenous flower)
on a far hillside. A (bird) flies over my grandfather's wind
tossed hair--he is laughing at a joke in a language I do not
understand, a tiny laughter like the wheeze of a sick child,
there in his breathing, what is that roughness--then the sandpaper
against my ears, the cough that pulls back the walls to this
room. This room. The open curtains and the day gray
with the threat of rain. My grandfather's nostrils hooked up
to the oxygen tank. He opens his mouth to breathe like a carp,
gasping. I want to close my eyes but I reach for his arm. His
hand flexes slightly, closes, then opens again, like a lung.
Like a tiny accordion. Adjusting the morphine. The anesthetic
music.
Copyright © 2007 by BOA Editions
Available editions:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-929918-92-8
Price: $15.50
Publishing Date: June 2007
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