Impossible Flying is Dawes’ most personal and universal collection, ‘telling family secrets to strangers’. There are moments of transcendence, but often there is ‘no epiphany, just the dire cadence of regret’ since the failures of the past cannot be undone, and there is no escape from human vulnerability, the disappointment of hopes, bodily decay and death. From that bleak acceptance comes a chastened consolation, and as for poems, ‘they are fine and they always find a way to cope/they outlast everything, cynical to the last foot.’ The family secrets focus primarily on the triangular relationship between the poet, his father and younger brother, though in For Mama there is a heartfelt and deeply moving acknowledgement of the rocklike unconditionality of a mother’s love and care for her family’s wounded souls. As ever with Dawes’ collections, the rewards come not only from the individual poems, but also from their careful arrangement, internal conversations and from the overarching meanings that emerge from the architecture of the four sections.
Legend begins the exploration of family mythology and the special place of the youngest brother and the hubristic hopes invested in him. Estimated Prophet gives context to the process of the brother’s descent into madness and their father’s collapse into despair and premature death in the condition of Jamaica in the 1980s when cold war politics and tribal wars brought an end to the dreams of the socialistic 70s, ‘that valiant, austere decade’. Here the comic vision of the first section cannot be sustained in writing about ‘those chaotic seven years of dust’. This section also deepens the counter-discourse of self-reflection on the act of writing the poems: the confessions of impersonation (‘I have stolen much…’) and the ambivalent space between history and myth in the filtering of memory and constructed family narratives. The third section, Brother Love is set in the present and deals with the renewal of relationship with the brother and the guilty respite of being away ‘from the long lament’, with marriage, children and ‘the peace and constancy/of new homes, while old homes seem/to crumble about us.’ The last section, For My Little Brother explores the difficult dialogue between these two worlds, between a past that is unalterable and a present that is shaped by it, but that contains its own possibilities. Impossible Flying is deeply felt writing that has an intensity and tautness which, if not new in Dawes’ work, rises to new levels of eloquence. It is impossible to read this collection without feeling that one’s consciousness of what it means to be human has been immeasurably deepened, or without wanting to constantly return to the poems.