Of Cautious Steps by Darren Black, Lily Poetry Review Books, November 2024.
Darren Black’s debut poetry collection, Of Cautious Steps, offers both solace and pleasure—a respite amidst today’s roiling political landscape. Black’s gentle, observant speaker guides readers through a world teeming with love, loss, joy, and adventure as experienced by a man who is blind.
In poem after well-crafted poem, Black weaves imagination, memory and observation with apt philosophical insights. His love poems are particularly poignant as evidenced by these lines from “Winter Gourd.”
“...Did Plato really believe the gods
cleaved the mortal “one” in two?
I imagine our shadows are larger than two.
It’s in these moments I want to tangle
the bones of our days and go
the way of the winter gourd
to a memory of spring
clinging to you, to me, to our halves
of the seed, tightest at the day’s end.”
Of Cautious Steps also captures childhood experiences. In “Mainstream Test Case, 1973,” the speaker is in first grade, learning to read.
“Dick and Jane waver
in my ten times magnifier,
letters like swimmers surface:
C’s like sideways smiles,
J’s like fish hooks,
G’s like closed fists...”
In “Snow Event” the speaker recalls a childhood storm.
“...How easily the clean row of ranch homes
is negated, the greenery swallowed
in eddies and swirls of powder.
I see my childhood of escape
zipped up in a maroon striped snowsuit
buried beneath the frozen weight.
How good it was to be dead
for a time. The fortress lost and abandoned,
the calls of friends retreating...”
The collection also includes a “Covid” poem which, happily, unequivocally stands the test of time. “Quarantine Window” begins:
“Mud of cold coffee, low tide
in the cove. Clouds clear morning throats, spit drops staccato
prayer against our kitchen pane.”
Since the closing poem, “White Cane Traveler,” is one of my favorites, and weaves together many of the book’s themes, I’ll finish with an excerpt from it.
“...A picket fence becomes your guide,
bowed staves, musty sweet
pass you to the buckled street—
to stink weed in the sidewalks split,
the pithy prick of a rose tendril,
papery licks of hydrangea leaves,
the exhaling of the linden’s hill.
Surrender to the slope ahead
where houses stagger, catch their step...
...The gritty hour’s caught in the throat.
broken stones stump your feet
and juniper bristles sprawl and reach.
Map again this tapestry
followed with a sensuous pace.
Map again this tapestry.
Tap step. Tap step. Tap.”
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Author Darren Black’s work has appeared in the Muddy River Poetry Review, The Saranac Review online, Of Rust and Glass, and in Lily Poetry Review’s anthology Voices Amidst the Virus. Of Cautious Steps is his first poetry collection. He lives on Massachusetts’ north shore with his life partner and has recently retired from a rehabilitation counseling career. Darren reads at local open mikes, and enjoys playing music, connecting with new friends and places through travel, coaching adaptive sports, advocating for disability accommodations, and teaching others about blindness through his own experiences.
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Reviewer Mary Beth Hines is a frequent contributor to Lightwood. She is the author of “Winter at a Summer House” (Kelsay, 2021) and her work appears widely in literary journals. Her chapbook manuscript was a finalist in both Fool for Poetry’s and Comstock Review’s 2023 contests. Connect with her at https://www.marybethhines.com
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