Husbandry: Poems

by Matthew Dickman

An intimate, moving volume of poems on the anxieties and love of single fatherhood and domestic life. Guided by acclaimed poet Matthew Dickman’s signature “clarity and ability to engage” (David Kirby, New York Times ), Husbandry is a love song from a father to his children. Written after a separation and during overwhelming single-fatherhood in the early days of COVID-19 lockdowns, Husbandry refuses romantic notions of parenting and embraces all its mess, anguish, humor, fear, boredom, and warmth. Dickman composes these poems entirely in vivid couplets that animate the various domestic pairs of broken-up parents, two sons, love and grief. He explores the terrain of his children’s dreams and nightmares, the almost primal fears that spill into his own, and the residual impacts of his parents’ failures. Threading his anxieties with bright moments of beauty and gratitude, the volume delights in seeing the world through the clear eyes of childhood and finds meaning in the domestic work―repetitive, exhausting, and sublime―of sustaining three lives. With tender, aching precision, Husbandry reveals the poet’s hunger to be a husband without ever being one, and his search for a father that ends with becoming one himself.

Genres: Poetry, Parenting

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2022

About the author

Matthew Dickman is an American poet. He and his identical twin brother, Michael Dickman, also a poet, were born in Portland, Oregon.

Dickman has received fellowships from The Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, The Vermont Studio Center, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

He is the author of three chapbooks, Amigos, Something about a Black Scarf and Wish You Were Here, and three full-length poetry collections. His first book, All-American Poem, was winner of the 2008 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry, published by American Poetry Review and distributed by Copper Canyon Press. He was also the winner of the 2009 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for that book, and the inaugural May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. His second full collection of poetry, Mayakovsky's Revolver, was published by W. W. Norton and Company in 2012. He is also the coauthor with his brother, of the 2012 poetry collection 50 American Plays, also published by Copper Canyon Press, and the 2016 Brother, a collection of poems on their half-brother's suicide. His third collection, Wonderland, was published in 2018 by Norton.

His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Clackamas Literary Review, AGNI Online, The Missouri Review, and The New Yorker.

Reviews

[Maggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

He is the only white man i trust

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written book (about which I have a couple of significant reservations; more on those at the end). I think of Dickman as a poet who writes long blocky poems with long lines; that was probably never a just assessment, but after this book I won't think of him that way again. Here the poems are in delicate short-lined couplets that seem to move easily down the page, sometime almost dancing, but always carrying the narrative. Perhaps the couplets are meant to reflect the breaking apart of the relationship under examination here, perhaps meant to capture something of the relationship of father and sons. Here are lines (picked at random) from the opening of "Porpoise":

In the morning
my three-year-old

looks up from his
cold glass

of milk, the color
of white dogwood

flower, and says
poppa, you have a penis

and I have a penis.


Action. And one strong image. Very direct language, unadorned, strong. And a child talking. Dickman, of course, knows that this skates strongly towards an attitude some readers might find sentimental, but he doesn't give a damn. He goes there anyway, and it's deeply moving.

The book can be read quickly, but I think that does a disservice to it. Best to slow down. There is a sadness here, the common sadness of the end of love, and Dickman writes it like a master.

Now my reservations. One of the problems with the "lyric I" is that it often sounds like special pleading for the figure who we must think of as the poet himself. This probably goes back to Sappho, but would be obvious in Shakespeare's sonnets. The poet, even when presenting problems or vulnerabilities, is most likely to present himself in the more sympathetic light. That is certainly the case here.

And that is very closely connected to my second reservation: Even though we see "Julia" (yes, Dickman names her) taking care of the children sometimes, there is really no indication that she is playing a role in their lives. It doesn't seem as if she has abandoned them, except in the anger of the poet. But the loss and the anger (in addition to the poet's relationships with sons) are the real subjects here, and maybe they should be allowed their own perceptions?

(Full disclosure: I know, slightly, the people involved in these striking poems, and I am fond of all of them. That probably colors both my admiration for the poems and the vaguely troubling reservations I am left with)

[Here's Johnny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yet another reason why I feel Matthew Dickman is one of our best living poets. This collection will knock the breath out of your body, and leave you gasping for more.

[bj · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book speaks so perfectly to the feeling of grief after loss when the person was not a good addition to your life and is still alive. It also really beautifully touches on the guilt of some things not redeeming the loss you've faced, like the children that you gained. I also really enjoyed his transparency about love and devotion and the strange ways these can take shape in our lives.

Some of my favorite lines:
"If I wanted to honor every ghost in my life I would be bowing all day."
"Grab him instead by the branch of his wrist too hard, too much like a father who may not be his father, and yank him back to bed so I could return to the nightly business of being angry at his mother for leaving me."
"The fiddlehead turns on itself but only ever in love."
"And I thought about all those fathers in the animal kingdom who eat their young, eat their hearts out of their chests, not because they are hungry, or jealous, no, not because of some ancient, locked-in thread of DNA that has yet to evolve, but because they do not know how to eat themselves."
"To walk right into your arms like walking into the world itself."
"I am not on a journey. I am cooking dinner for my kids. I am washing their hair and underwear, I am trying to go for walks outside, trying to eat more vegetables. If my children do not bathe for a few days they begin to smell like pond water. It's all I can do not to fill my pockets up with stones and wade out into the middle of them."
"For someone to stand next to me. And in the standing, feel proud."

[Roxane Dumontheil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve had a literary crush on Matthew Dickman since he visited my high school and I return to quite a few of his poems pretty often. I had no idea he had released a new collection and while this one was very different (only short couplets), I found myself moved nearly to tears many many times by their quiet, reel table, beauty.

[silas denver melvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

a high 3. am sure this will mean more to me later in my own life

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of poetry is a tender meditation on fatherhood, single-parenthood, loss of and separation from loved ones, and the things that anchor us to life and to each other. So many of these poems knocked the breath from my lungs—quite literally I found myself leaning back and sighing out, as if I’d been punched in the diaphragm—not only with their starbursts of beautiful lines, but with their brutal honesty, their raw vulnerability. Who can forget, having once read them, the naked honesty of poems like “Husbandry” (“I wanted to be a husband. / Someone worth / being kept by another, / greater animal”), like “Nativity Play” (“I have always / done what people have told / me to do, like a clothespin, / quietly”), like “After All” (“I am / supposed to say / they are worth it, / all the pain, / the morphine / drip of meanness, / year after year”). It’s in the very particularity of Dickman’s experience that these poems speak to fears, pains, and longings we all experience. I admire the candid gaze in these poems, how they don’t shy away from staring openly at the soft, easily-wounded spots in us that we usually try to keep hidden.

The candid gaze of these poems isn’t only reserved for pain and difficulty: it’s also attentive to the small joys that knit up our lives. This is beautifully captured in the final lines of the collection: “Give me / life, even the one / I have had with all / it’s stupid troubles[…] / Give me / a sink full of dirty dishes, / give me a cup of coffee, / give me my children, / their sticky hands and feet.”

[Linda Michel-Cassidy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is beautiful. It reads as a memoir in verse, in fact the narrative through line was so engrossing that I had to reread for the lyric aspects (which are stunning, as well). Most of the poems stand on their own, but definitely work best as the whole. The speaker talks about being a father to two sons, centering on the younger one. It's interesting, because one usually sees a book with this strong of a narrative written in prose, yet here, the poet maintains the "story" aspect as well as write a wonderful book of poems.
From the memoir standpoint, the topic fatherhood, single-parenting (implied) is a hard one to pull off without the speaker/writer writing their own heroism into the story. Dickman stays away from this, which is what makes the stance work so well.
(I am a review editor; will definitely be assigning this)

[Heather O'Neill · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had never heard of Matthew Dickman until I went to a book talk of his at the Porland Book Festival. I really enjoyed his poems and what he said about his work. He's also a local author. Since my goal is to read more poetry this year, this book was a no brainer for me. I really liked a lot of his poems that deal with fatherhood and the dissolution of his marriage. I could relate to some of the parenting ones.
I was glad that I heard him read some of his poems because in my head I was able to get the right cadence down. Someone could definitely finish this book in one sitting, but I took my time with it.

I would give it 4.25 stars

[Angy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very solid and cohesive modern poetry collection that shows the emotions and experience of a single father who was left by his wife, though he always dreamed of being a husband. It's quite different from my own experience but Matthew wrote about his feelings and story so powerfully that I really empathized with him. Some of the pieces here were a bit too "modern" with more casual language, which isn't my favorite type of poetry, but I genuinely think the author has a way with words while being self-aware and reflective. All good traits for a poet to have. I'd love to read more of his work, and he seems to be a cool person outside of his work as well.

[Wayne Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that I will read again (and again). It is breathtakingly tender, fragile couplets stitched together into a rich complicated life, all the days and nights of parenting, boredom and beauty, and the rawness that follows a breakup; so much father love filling page after page, threaded with grief and longing and a real darkness too that’s hard to acknowledge but all parents know it’s there.

Who knew that chores could be so beautiful?

There is so much violent masculine energy in the air, circulated by men who don’t give a shit about children, this book is an antidote of sorts, it charts a way we desperately need.

[Camille Dungy]

The greater than human world and the mundanely human are bound up in this book. Accomplices in horror and happiness. Dickman relays a dailiness examined so closely it often alters into something almost strange, like that bizarre moment you attend to the steps of an oft-repeated action and note, with anatomical, perhaps even scatological, precision, how wild and wonderful it is to be alive.

Review published originally with Orion Magazine: https://orionmagazine.org/article/12-...

[Bryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dickman writes in a unique couplet style in all the poems in this collection. They are also thematically connected by his explorations of fatherhood as a single father. He babeoing divorced res his soul with striking imagery that explores the pain of loss of being divorced and the pain and joy of single fatherhood. Parenthood is never easy, but is especially difficult as a single parent. There is joy too, which shines through as well. These poems deserve reading over more than once to savor their richness.

[Kristen Brida · Rating 5 out of 5]

A simultaneously tender and visceral portrait of fatherhood, death, and separation. Dickman’s voice has a startlingly observant cadence and his command of syntax and the lines expands the worlds within Husbandry.
I’m already recommending my poetry friends to buy Husbandry when it’s released in June.

[Devon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Matthew Dickman’s collection is prescient, examining single fatherhood at the onset of the pandemic. It’s written in couplets and so we see pairs: two sons, broken hearted parents, love and grief. There is a deep reality here of what it means to parent, what it means to struggle with the messiness of life. Highly recommend.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much life in these poems. They capture the messiness of love and family in such a detail-focused and caring way, that it almost gives the illusion of tidiness. Still, under the surface, spots of darkness taken over by a beacon of light.

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love Dickman’s work and i’m especially impressed by this collection, detailing fatherhood and parenthood from a really unique perspective and through intimate little scenes like a box of thrifted polaroids where you suddenly feel like you know all the people just from these small moments.

[Sally Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is beguiling and lovely, full of wit and grief offered to the reader in everyday yet uniquely seen images. I haven't been this moved by a collection of poetry by a male author since Stephen Dobyns' Cemetery Nights.

[Again and again and again · Rating 5 out of 5]

absolutely beautiful

[Eric Sutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incisive. Brilliant insight cuts through terse images. A collection I will be returning to. He’s an impressive person, funny and wise. I need to order a copy of his first collection.

[Allie · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is like "i can't help it. i love the way men love." in poetry collection form. so good.

[Kaylee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ferocious quiet grace

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like sitting with a friend who has sobbed for months and is now empty of everything but the truth, and sits with you, describing, smell by smell, the hardest and truest things (especially the sheer terror of parenting) and you don't want to breathe so as not to break the spell. These poems go inside of places you have been scared of and becalm them.

My Official Book Recommendation for last Monday night's Emotional Historians.

[Peter Rock · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much! Hurts. The meals, the laundry.

"I'm not so much afraid that I will
collapse as I'm afraid I am the collapse."

These couplets are destroyers.

[elaje · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m crying

[Michelle McGrane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Day 28 Choice The Sealey Challenge 2022