Arrow Pointing North

by David Dodd Lee

David Dodd Lee’s speaker responds to his wife’s debilitating illness and the threat it poses to their life together by immersing himself in Nature’s dark “Late afternoons, in the fall, while the children / Chase each other with their paper horses, / ...the bones of digested songbirds / Thud down / Onto soft green beds, pine needles and moss.” His poems combat physical limitations with a heightening of the senses, and the opening of a symbolic “That landscape of spectral forms / We glide through, silently, unable to speak...”

Genres: Poetry

68 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

David Dodd Lee has published nine full-length books of poems and a chapbook. His newest book is a second book of Ashbery erasure poems, And Others, Vaguer Presences (BlazeVox, 2016). His first was Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere, the Ashbery Erasure Poems (BlaxeVox 2010).He is also the author of Animalties (Four Way, 2014), The Coldest Winter on Earth (Marick Press, 2012), The Nervous Filaments (Four Way Books 2010), and Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press 2010), as well Abrupt Rural (New Issues), which was published in 2004. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Nation, West Branch,Jacket, Gulf Coast, Blackbird, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pool, Denver Quarterly, Slope, Pleiades, Laurel Review, Nerve, and Massachusett's Review. He was the editor of the annual poetry and fiction anthology, SHADE, published by Four Way Books. Lee is also the publisher of Half Moon Bay poetry chapbooks, which include titles by Franz Wright and Hugh Seidman. In the past he has served as poetry editor at Third Coast and Passages North. He has worked as a park ranger, a fisheries technician, and a journalist. He received the MFA degree in 1993, after taking a BFA in painting and Art History in the eighties. He teaches creative writing and visual art at Indiana University South Bend.