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  • The Four Rings: New and Selected Poems by Fred Dings
  • Lawrence F. Rhu
The Four Rings: New and Selected Poems. By Fred Dings. Nacogdoches, TX: Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2020. ISBN 978-1-622-88304-7. Pp. 112. $18.00.

The Four Rings: New and Selected Poems by Fred Dings is a welcome arrival. Dings' relatable voice sustains an engagingly familiar nearness to the heart of matters that we overlook or neglect at our cost. The master trope of his title puts personal relations at the center of a series of ever-expanding circles from self and family to community and the world, or worlds, beyond. In retrospect, which is one of the pleasures of reading this far-ranging collection, "The Family Gathering," an earlier poem, anticipates this turn toward warmth "at the fire of earthly belonging." Being centered enables traveling afar in Dings' later poems. They transport us from hearth and home and neighborhood to Himalayan meditation caves in Tibet and to the stars, which, even in his earlier work, "abandon themselves to the dark and shine" or seed "new matter in the fertile night."

In Dings' sharable universe of meaningful connections, nuclear and local affairs resonate in harmony with the music of the spheres: "Spheres" features the speaker attending to details of sound and sense from the unborn within his expecting spouse's round belly, now nearly arrived at term. But claiming our share in such a vast scheme of things, or simply recognizing it, comes at a cost. For example, the reckoning with mortality in "Stage IV" serves as a predicate for a powerful will to cherish life, even in its humblest manifestations, like earthworms rescued from extinction on sun-burnt summer streets by a cancer-stricken neighbor. He shuffled [End Page 594] by each morning with "his bone-slats body draped in shirt and slacks, / and his face as taut as lampshade skin. / He strained to move as though he dragged / a sack of rocks behind him." In "The Concession," an earlier poem, the speaker faces a similar dilemma, but his kindred impulse to rescue a trapped beaver is curtailed by the victim's own "censoring teeth."

The Four Rings contains memorable poems from Dings' previous books, as well as striking new ones which fill more than one-third of its pages. Sentiments and stories of earlier poems hold up handsomely and reveal key stages in this poet's development while new work both advances and deepens our experience of listening to this companionable voice. Dings' first collection, After the Solstice (1993), inherited a rare vitality from the late poems of James Wright in To a Blossoming Pear Tree (1977) and The Journey (1982), and it ably transmitted a kindred energy. Wright began his 1977 collection with "Redwings," and Dings began his with "Redwing Blackbirds" in homage to a poetic father whose Italian journeys helped him revive his expressive powers at a distance from the toxic shame and civil unrest permeating our country during the Vietnam War. Wright enabled his worthy heir to discover similar sources of inspiration in Italy, especially in the Veneto, where the Roman poet Catullus was born in Verona and his family had a villa on Lake Garda in Sirmione, and where the exiled Florentine, Dante, was hospitably taken in by Can Grande della Scala in Verona. Dings' chosen line of poetic descent via Wright travels back quickly: first, a generation, and, ultimately, two millennia. He makes it explicit in The Four Rings by supplying "Riva toward Sirmione" with a dedication to James Wright, though it lacked one in After the Solstice. The poem itself is a beauty in which we find ourselves on the move between earth and heaven and between empirical observation and metaphorical transfiguration: "Rain pocks the body of the lake into thin skins of water / which reflect for a moment and are gone." In "Primal Sun, Primal Moon," such reflection develops a further potential through the recovery of integrity via memory in persons who do not take what's given for granted. They "not only reflect, / but radiate with the received light of the world."

One might say Dings' early poems are a young man...

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