Dave Parsons of Conroe, Texas, has been recipient of many honors and awards, including a National Endowment of Humanities Dante Fellowship to the State University of New York, the French-American Poetry Prize, and the 2006 Baskerville Publisher’s Poetry Prize from TCU for an outstanding poem published in their literary journal, Descant. He holds eight Writing Awards from the Lone Star College District and he was named Montgomery County Poet Laureate for 2005–2010. He was elected to the Texas Institute of Letters in 2009.

POETRY
David M. Parsons

Reaching for Longer Water: Selected & New

Texas Review Press

Paperback, 978-1680030327, 200 pgs., $12.95

Reviewed by Mary Newport, Norman Transcript

Dave Parsons, 2011 Texas State Poet Laureate, visited our neighbor state to the north last fall for readings at the Full Circle Bookstore in Oklahoma and the Depot in Norman, signing copies of his Reaching for Longer Water: Selected & New. We’re reprising Mary Newport’s review, which originally appeared in the Norman Transcript in Oct 2015, with permission of the publisher.

Reaching for Longer Water is Parsons’s sixth book of poetry, containing both some old favorites and a large body of fresh work. A great deal of the subject matter is about turning the prosaic into the poetic. Childhood is viewed through the nurturing sunshine of Scout meetings led by a smiling father figure. Canoeing becomes a dark ritual of water and wind. The town of Austin is transformed into an island of sensations rising from the sea of time. Parsons breaks his world into a series of vivid impressions, jewel-tipped memories, and dynamic sensations, skimming across the surface of his psyche before stooping to snatch a glimmering phrase. Into each memory he condenses the truths of a lifetime.

His subject matter is not all commonplace, however. He mixes Dante and Bob Dylan, explores the pangs of fatherhood with the pain of eating too many donuts, and remembers both the Alamo and his parents’ couch. Parsons seems to question the reader’s notions of what is truly exceptional, imbuing his teenage yearnings — and by extension our own — with as much symbolic importance as the ideals of an era or the works of great philosophers.

Parsons’s poetry is mostly flesh and sun-warmed stone, eschewing airy meanderings for the solid rhythms of a man firmly planted in earth and water. Pieces like “Ghost Hawk” and “Canoeing” blanket the reader in natural sensations, while works like “Comforter” and “Fried Green Tomatoes” thrum with the human connection. His occasional departures into less grounded poetry are no less engaging, however. “The Dancer” is a dizzying flight with a sudden landing, and “Evening After Eating Rainbows (Caught on Mystic Lake)” is a perfect representation of the way love bridges the gap between base physical sensation and soul-­deep truths.

The book is an autobiography in poetry, welcoming readers into the author’s life and encouraging them to open themselves to their own inherent wisdom. Parsons’s work will resonate with readers, ushering them into a state of nostalgic, childlike openness to the world.

Read if: You believe that every day is exceptional.

Don’t read if: You think wisdom has to come from far away.

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