Chip Dameron has long been involved in the Texas small press scene, initially in Austin. He teaches now at a small place on the southernmost tip of the state, where some buildings remain from a frontier fort, and across the resaca, raucous two-tone parakeets roost every night. He has, it appears, been entranced by that nocturnal game of the suburbs, softball. He once frequented the campus of Duke University and has visited Poquoson. This new book of his offers surprising variety for a poet with gray in his beard, as though he's still experimenting, willing to take chances.
Poetry happens most persuasively when passion and art fuse.
And this feeling of wonder unfolds through several discoveries, the last sobering. It may not be entirely fair to say these pieces are less compelling, since they supply much of the context for the finale. It's certainly the least comfortable and confident. Capital-L literature presides over Dameron's work to its occasional detriment. The section is both articulate and thorough, but the language can be stock and slack, and one poem swerves off course, starting as a memorial to a Tahitian woman who left for France, but ending with an incident involving the poet's son.