Big Life

In Big Life, Sam Dodson offers us appreciations, historical reflections, and kind, affectionate, sometimes aching, reminiscences of an Omaha childhood and his dearest friends and family. Alternately funny, incantatory, and deeply elegiac these are, in Sam Dodson's own phrase, poems of the soul. -Ron Hansen, Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J. Professor, Santa Clara University. Author of "The Kid," "Mariette in Ecstasy," "Atticus," and "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford". Sam Dodson's Big Life is a remarkable book. Its subtitle identifies the work as "A Poetic Memoir," and, as a result, many of the poems are reminiscences, often painted with a tender charm, but, given the nature of human existence, just as frequently soiled by a rueful sense of loss-of family members, of friends, and of mentors. The range here encompasses what Dodson calls "windows of color / glass lead & story light & art." Details strew the poems with physical debris (hot plates, green stamps, waxed linoleum, and bomb shelters) and cultural artifacts (works by Yeats, Pollock, Kerouac, and Joni Mitchell) which memorialize the middle of the twentieth century. A "doubting faith" and "broken worlds" provide no answer to the traditional ubi sunt theme, except for the delights and disappointments of family, the pecan trees whose roots yearn for rain and the stars which cannot always guarantee inspiration. In lives where "night will always come," Dodson's poems recognize the joie de vivre of Harold and Maude and the "calm of language" that help us to survive and to thrive, which these poems herald as our true mission in the Big Life of all of us. -Michael Skau, Emeritus Professor, University of Nebraska at Omaha, and author of " 'Constantly Risking Absurdity': The Writings of Lawrence Ferlinghetti," "Complexities and Tensions in the Works of Gregory Corso: 'A Clown in a Grave,' " and "Old Poets". Sam Dodson is a terrific poet and a consummate storyteller. The "little worlds" that he crafts in Big Life steadily, delicately cohere into an enthralling memoir - a story that conjures up the pieces and the places and the people that have shaped him, and that inspire him still. -Thomas Schatz, Professor of Film, The University of Texas, and author of "Hollywood Genres," "Boom and Bust," and "The Genius of the System".