Michael Favala Goldman writes of relationships and brokenness
Families who disapprove of a choice of spouse. War refugees debating what to take with them. A boy navigating his parents’ divorce. A lost friendship. A child born with a physical impairment. A romance going awry. The physical pains that often accompany emotional ones. The special dinner that grows cold. Trying to help a friend with dementia. A father suffering a brain tumor.
This is the world of Destinations: Poems, the ninth poetry collection by Michael Favala Goldman. It’s a world of brokenness and people managing through it, sometimes well and sometimes not.
Goldman describes this world with simple, almost stark language. The poems are preoccupied less with language and its sounds and meanings and more with the stories the words are telling. They’re not so much narrative poems as they are impressionistic. They leave the reader with the sense of loss, of what is and what should have been but wasn’t.
The 75 poems included by Goldman in Destinations are not all about brokenness; some are simply about the minor irritations in married life, as two different ingrained ways of thinking collide over the seemingly trivial.
Customs
My wife rarely puts
a lid on properly.
I don’t say anything.
It runs in her family.
It was no problem for them.
They had an understanding.
Blame runs in my family.
Lids go on tight.
Everything put away immediately.
More than once I take a bottle
of juice from the fridge
and shake it without checking.
Michael Favala Goldman
Goldman has published eight previous collections of poetry. He’s also translated seven poetry collections, 10 prose works, and a children’s book from the Danish. His poems have been published in numerous literary journals. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he leads in-person and virtual poetry critique groups, teaches on “a poet’s place,” and serves as chair of the Program Committee for Straw Dogs Writers Guild and as a member of the Board of Directors for the Northampton Center for the Arts. He also performs on clarinet and bass clarinet with his band, Now’s the Time, which plays jazz, blues, and swing.
Given what so many of the poems of Destinations are about, they’re not dark ones, oddly enough. Goldman’s use of simple language instead creates the sense of statement of fact; this is what it is, and you can mourn or lament but it’s better to accept and move on. I’ve not seen this before in poetry collections I’ve read; Goldman has a unique voice that sets him and his poems apart.
Photo by Wendelin Jacober, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
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
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