Impossible Flying (review)

Prolific and protean writer Kwame Dawes's latest poetry collection, Impossible Flying, focuses on familial dynamics and more specifically Dawes's relationship with a mentally-ill younger brother. Wisely, Dawes does not sensationalize his sibling's malady. Rather, he delineates the emotional architecture of a kinship that is sometimes as intricate as a Gordian knot.

In some of his other works, such as his debut novel, She's Gone (2007), and his spectral and supernal short story "Marley's Ghost," Dawes writes about characters that struggle with mental illness. Somewhat puzzlingly, in all three instances, including Impossible Flying, Dawes refuses to name the malady.

Dawes divides Impossible Flying's thirty-five poems into five sections. The first, "Legend"—written almost exclusively from Dawes's point of view as a child—displays the most thematic cohesion. Here, Dawes, with gimlet-like precision, captures a four-year-old's idiolect and sentiments while simultaneously exploring the universal experiences of competition and confusion that often attend the birth of a younger sibling. This section's eponymous poem, "Legend," closes—following his younger brother's birth—with the prescient line: "now the world had changed as worlds must" (12). The section's second piece, "The Usurper Arrives," written in sinuous couplets, wends along detailing the setting of Dawes's childhood abode. And only in the final stanza does Dawes introduce a character, his brother, whom he unflatteringly describes: "to this first home/ you came usurper of all I surveyed" (13).

With such charged and personal material, any writer runs the risk of the work devolving into either histrionics or treacle. But like Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau, or Cornelius Eady's You Don't Miss Your Water, both book-length meditations on a single topic, Dawes maintains a critical distance throughout this multivalent emotional investigation. Interestingly, he not only displays this remove as the author, but as a character in Impossible Flying; he portrays himself as a person who constantly scrutinizes and checks his own emotional responses. And going one step further than Komunyakaa and Eady's works, Impossible Flying possesses a pronounced chronological arc, where poems, such as "Alma Mater" and "Resurrection," engage in a dialogue across both memory and time.

The visceral poem "Anatomy of Anger" is one of the few times Impossible Flying shifts its largely ruminative tone. (In this piece, Dawes's brother attacks him.) During a self-reflective moment in the aforementioned piece, Dawes avers that, "Anger is an alien mood" (56). But his assertion mirrors how anger, explosive anger, is "alien" to Impossible Flying as well. Anger could be one of Dawes's reactions to his brother's illness and his attendant behavior. But wisely, Dawes both as writer of, and character in, Impossible Flying never resorts to this.

Throughout, displaying a nostalgic streak, Dawes longs for his youth and for a brother who, as a child, was not ill (his brother's sickness does not manifest until he is fourteen). Throughout, Dawes displays ambivalence about accepting that his brother is a grown man. In one poem, he admits, "I speak to you / as if you have not left that teenager's giddy place of wonder [. . .]" (76). And then in "Vernacular," he plainly states, "We are grown men, now" (31). Dawes's ambivalence is multifaceted, because he conflates his difficulty in recognizing his brother's adulthood with his inability to accept his brother's malady. This is a wondrously nuanced touch.

Although Dawes depicts his sibling as an individual needing succor, through his actions, this brother teaches Dawes—the polished, accomplished person—about both grace and shamelessness. In "Secrets," Dawes observes: "[. . .] you have learned the tyranny of discretion, learned to shun it [. . .]" (41). Whereas, personally, Dawes recognizes that, "I have lived all turned in on myself [. . .]" (41), lived with "[. . .] my decency, my sanity, the lie of my life" (41).

In his book-length epic Jacko Jacobus, Dawes uses the bible as a touchstone while modernizing the story of Esau and Jacob. On a smaller scale throughout Impossible Flying, Dawes personalizes and inverts elements of this...