The Second O of Sorrow
Sean Thomas Dougherty
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Second O of Sorrow
Sean Thomas Dougherty
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Traced throughout The Second O of Sorrow are Dougherty’s devastating reflections on his wife’s illness. Alternating between beautiful odes to love and grim observations on what it means to be fighting for life in this country, these poems are their own sort of metaphor for the Rust Belt.
The poems are replete with rundown towns, futures, people and relationships, and yet it’s an awe-inspiring collection that shows how a skilled hand can find light in the darkest things.
As I read these poems I thought of Peter Handke’s brilliant, tortured, autobiographical novella, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams.
Sean Thomas Dougherty’s most recent collection of poems...succeeds most of all in elucidating beauty, even among what is ugly, even among what is disheartening and difficult for a reader to face. In this, he finds moments of transcending what could be considered 'ordinary' and rendering it 'extraordinary.' The manner in which the poems move assumes a sense of the transience of a day, and yet the turning over of a new one.
Words may not change the living conditions of our violent country—they certainly cannot change our mortality, the loss that comes heavy with the death of a loved one—but they can be held up to the wound, measured against it, and provide one with a sense of togetherness. Others have wounds of the same shape who have survived to weave words that gleam. With The Second O of Sorrow, Dougherty has made something beautiful for us that does not erase the pain, but shares it with us, lets us know we do not hurt alone..