• Home
  • Prompt Series—FREE
  • For Writers
  • Daily Poem-Subscribe! ✨
  • Teaching Tools
  • BOOKS Etc.
  • Patron Love

Poets and Poems: John Dorsey and “Your Daughter’s Country”

By Glynn Young 2 Comments

I’m reading Your Daughter’s Country, the recent poetry collection by the Missouri-based poet John Dorsey, and I’m thinking to myself that I wouldn’t want to be the subject of one of his poems. He casts an affectionate eye on his friends, acquaintances, and relatives, but it is a ruthlessly honest eye, one that sees them as they are—the good in them, the bad, the indifferent. You don’t read a poem with the title of “Coco Malone is a Bad Bitch” and expect both scalpel-like description and affection, but that’s what you get.

I’m put in mind of my Uncle Revis. He was my father’s brother-in-law, the husband of a beloved aunt who made the best biscuits in north Louisiana. If the word “garrulous” hadn’t already existed, it would have been invented just for him. For years, I spent a summer week or two with my grandmother, who lived across the street from my aunt and uncle, and we ate together, picked vegetables together (my job was digging for potatoes), and watched television together. Saturday nights meant The Lawrence Welk Show, and my Uncle Revis would sit quietly until the Lennon Sisters performed, when he would start shouting, “They’re ignorant!” at the television. It was something you got used to.

John Dorsey

He was a voracious reader, and he introduced me to James Michener and many other writers. He always smelled like pipe tobacco, and he was forever playing with his pipe and occasionally smoking it. And he raged about the next-door neighbor’s cats, of which there were many. Early one Saturday evening, we sat on his back steps as he contentedly told me stories and smoked his pipe. And then he tensed and told me to keep very quiet and still. He lifted his rifle (we always sat on the back steps with his rifle at hand), took careful aim, and then shot the cat that had dared to jump the fence into his yard. That the neighbors were his oldest son’s in-laws didn’t seem to matter. Or perhaps that was the point.

My Uncle Revis would be a character in a John Dorsey poem.

Dorsey tells stories about the people he knows and loves. He writes about grandparents, cousins, friends, the parents of friends, aunts and uncles. He writes about their pets, the towns where they lived, their work, their dreams, their tragedies, and what happens in their lives. The title poem is about his great-grandfather, who had already fathered 12 children when he met Dorsey’s great-grandmother and fathered more, although a few looked like the mailman, the milkman, and the trash collector, “any one of them made for better company / on a cold night.”

He also writes about his people’s music—the music they listen to and the music they sometimes become.

Walking After Midnight in Linn, Missouri

it’s the middle of the afternoon
& the jukebox that once offered
a youthful kiss from patsy cline in the moonlight
is now drowned out by the bartender
talking about how the fry cook
is not her boyfriend

sleepy eyed construction workers
are left to dream about true love
on their own as they wander back out
into the cold

their regrets will haunt them
long after the grease
from the fried chicken special
has settled in their stomachs

settling is just the way of things
nobody is searching for anyone
after midnight here

pride only makes you lonely

while the rest of the world
is fast asleep.

Dorsey is the author of some 50 books of poetry and chapbooks, including Being the Fire (2016) and Shoot the Messenger (2017). His work has appeared in more than 2,000 magazines and anthologies around the world. He is a founder and co-editor of The Gasconade Review. He lives in Belle, Missouri.

You don’t expect a contemporary book of poetry to take you back decades to your childhood, but that’s what Your Daughter’s Country did for me. It might remind you of the people who shaped your life, the people who were known to be “characters” in your family, and that families were dysfunctional long before the word “dysfunctional” was even known. And yet there is still affection, and love, and a sense of thankfulness for having known them.

Related:

John Dorsey reads “The Alligator Man”

Patsy Cline sings “Walkin’ After Midnight”

Photo by Paulius Malinovskis, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

Browse more book reviews

__________________________

How to Read a Poem by Tania Runyan How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

  • Author
  • Recent Posts
Glynn Young
Follow Glynn
Glynn Young
Editor and Twitter-Party-Cool-Poem-Weaver at Tweetspeak Poetry
Glynn Young lives in St. Louis where he recently retired as the team leader for Online Strategy & Communications for a Fortune 500 company. Glynn writes poetry, short stories and fiction, and he loves to bike. He is the author of Poetry at Work and the Dancing Priest Series. Find Glynn at Faith, Fiction, Friends.
Glynn Young
Follow Glynn
Latest posts by Glynn Young (see all)
  • Poets and Poems: Brad Lussier and “How Does He Love Me?” - April 12, 2021
  • An Epic Told in 500 Sonnets: “The Gift of Life” by Amanda Hall - April 6, 2021
  • A Novel About Hughes and Plath: “Your Story, My Story” by Connie Palmen - March 30, 2021

Related

❤️✨ Sharing is caring

Filed Under: article, book reviews, Books, Family Poems, Poems, poetry, poetry reviews, Poets

Comments

  1. Megan Willome says

    September 24, 2019 at 10:52 am

    Glynn, I really like how reading this collection made you think of one of your own relatives, wondering how he might have been rendered, had John Dorsey gotten a hold of him.

    I’m a big fan of storytelling and poetry that looks at people with ruthless honesty and sincere affection. It’s the kind of balance we’re most likely to give to family members, I think.

    Reply
  2. Laura Lynn Brown says

    September 24, 2019 at 2:26 pm

    The line about sleepy-eyed construction workers reminds me of the day (many decades ago) when some of my dad’s bricklayer cousins came to help him lay the cinderblock walls for a garage addition to the house. Lots of “Yo!” and “Ho!”

    I’m glad for that video of him reading. His delivery of the poems is so different from his introduction of them — more embodied, for one thing.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Take How to Read a Poem

Get the Introduction, the Billy Collins poem, and Chapter 1

get the sample now

Welcome to Tweetspeak

New to Tweetspeak Poetry? Start here, in The Mischief Café. You're a regular? Check out our April Menu.

Keep the World Poetic

❤️

Welcome a little patron love, when you help keep the world thoughtful and poetic.

5 FREE POETRY PROMPTS

Get 5 FREE inbox poetry prompts from the popular book How to Write a Poem

Join the Poetry Club

Join the poetry club, when you become a subscriber to Every Day Poems ✨

The classic—Now a Graphic Novel!

"Stunning, heartbreaking, and relevant illustrations"

Callie Feyen, teacher

read a summary of The Yellow Wallpaper

meet The Yellow Wallpaper characters

Recent Comments

  • Alex on National Poetry Month Book Giveaway—Tell Us Your Personal Poetry Story to Enter!
  • Megan Willome on 50 States of Generosity: Washington
  • Bethany R. on 50 States of Generosity: Washington
  • Megan Willome on Poet-a-Day: Meet Tom C. Hunley

Featured In

We're happy to have been featured in...

The Huffington Post

The Paris Review

The New York Observer

Tumblr Book News

Stay in Touch With Us

Categories

Learn to Write Form Poems

How to Write an Acrostic

How to Write a Ballad

How to Write a Catalog Poem

How to Write a Ghazal

How to Write a Haiku

How to Write an Ode

How to Write a Pantoum

How to Write a Rondeau

How to Write a Sestina

How to Write a Sonnet

How to Write a Villanelle

Free Printable Poet Bios

Browse all poet bios now

Shakespeare Resources

Poetry Classroom: Sonnet 18

Common Core Picture Poems: Sonnet 73

Sonnet 104 Annotated

Sonnet 116 Annotated

Character Analysis: Romeo and Juliet

Character Analysis: Was Hamlet Sane or Insane?

Why Does Hamlet Wait to Kill the King?

10 Fun Shakespeare Resources

About Shakespeare: Poet and Playwright

Top 10 Shakespeare Sonnets

See all 154 Shakespeare sonnets in our Shakespeare Library!

Explore Work From Black Poets

About Us

  • • Generous-Annual Theme 2021
  • • Our Story
  • • Meet Our Team
  • • Literary Citizenship
  • • Poet Laura
  • • Poetry for Life: The 5 Vital Approaches
  • • T. S. Poetry Press – All Books
  • • Contact Us

Write With Us

  • • 5 FREE Poetry Prompts-Inbox Delivery
  • • 30 Days to Richer Writing Workshop
  • • How to Write Form Poems-Infographics
  • • Poetry Club Tea Date
  • • Poetry Prompts
  • • Submissions

Read With Us

  • • All Our Books
  • • Best Love Poetry
  • • Book Club
  • • Charlotte Perkins Gilman Poems Library
  • • Every Day Poems
  • • Literacy Extras
  • • Literary Analysis
  • • Poems to Listen By: Audio Series
  • • Poet-a-Day
  • • Poets and Poems
  • • VerseWrights Journal
  • • William Blake Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Shakespeare Sonnet Library
  • • 50 States Projects

Celebrate With Us

  • • Poem on Your Pillow Day
  • • Poetic Earth Month
  • • Poet in a Cupcake Day
  • • Poetry at Work Day
  • • Random Acts of Poetry Day
  • • Take Your Poet to School Week
  • • Take Your Poet to Work Day

Gift Ideas

  • • Give the Gift of Every Day Poems
  • • Our Shop
  • • Everybody Loves a Book!

Connect

  • • Donate
  • • Blog Buttons
  • • By Heart
  • • Shop for Tweetspeak Fun Stuff

Copyright © 2021 Tweetspeak Poetry · Site by The Willingham Enterprise · FAQ & Disclosure