“Not Now But Soon” by Chris Dahl
Concrete Wolf – 96 pp - $18.99

The very title of a new, award-winning volume of poetry, “Not Now But Soon,” sounds a mite foreboding, doesn’t it? The photograph on the cover, furthermore, shows an older couple (it turns out to be the poet herself – Christine Dahl – and her husband) paddling a small boat across reflective waters into a murky unknown.

The dedication that precedes this collection by Dahl, who is an Olympia-based poet, hints at the nature of these personal reflections: “Soon came too soon: In memory of my father…” Dahl writes.

“And still Not Now: For my mother…” she continues.

While Dahl writes about and through episodes of loss and grief, readers who love luminous writing and careful observation mustn’t be spooked away. This poet deeply discerns the beauty of each passing day – mining it for even the smallest particle of golden insight or pleasure. For if “the consolation of nature” at times overwhelms, Dahl assures us there is “at least the smaller / consolation of the singular moment.”

These lines come from her poem titled “Reading ‘Dover Beach’ on New Year’s Day,” which is one of a healthy handful of Dahl’s poems that refer to the work of other poets.

In the case of “Dover Beach,” it’s an irresistible challenge to the reader to revisit Matthew Arnold’s sweeping 19th-century view of the world and its ills (complete with a reference to Sophocles, the playwright of ancient Greek tragedies), and then do the old “compare and contrast” exercise we learned in junior high English class.

Juxtapose Arnold’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the “Sea of Faith” with Dahl’s lakefront view – she admits that hers is a “limited pond of rationality” with a small clutch of “bobbing ducks, not even grand as mallards” and no classical allusions whatsoever.

But the “vast confusions” that Arnold bemoans a century and a half earlier still roil humanity, and Dahl acknowledges as much.

Though the beginning lines of Dahl’s “Reading ‘Dover Beach’” poem might be read as a wry riposte to Arnold’s more histrionic work, if you read through to the end, you may agree that her poem is a worthy 21st century contribution to the millennia-long acknowledgment by poets of the enduring tragic aspect of human existence.

Within her poems, Dahl interacts with other poets too.

Whether referencing the deaths of friends and relations, her mother’s mounting frailties, or her husband’s episode of cardiac arrest (which had a good outcome!) Dahl has witnessed enough to understand that nothing lasts forever. In fact, she even goes so far as to compile “The List of Griefs” in a poem.

But while this collection grapples with our finite condition, it really isn’t grim. It may not be about transcendence, but it offers a type of continuity.

“The universe unfurls at enormous speed,” Dahl muses in one poem, while in another she reassures readers that despite our own brief trajectories, “there are still stars to hold as proof / for certain theories of eternity.”

“Not Now But Soon” is dark – but not depressing.

The Bookmonger is Barbara Lloyd McMichael, who writes this weekly column focusing on the books, authors and publishers of the Pacific Northwest. Contact her at bkmonger@nwlink.com