by Robert Fillman

While Dallas Crow’s poetry collection Troutwatching seems to take fishing as its ostensible subject, the poems themselves are far less concerned with trout or bait or tackle than with fatherhood, aging, and the challenges faced in middle life.

Having said that, a confession is in order: I’ve been fishing only twice in my life. Once as a boy, with my father and older brother—we caught nothing, not even a nibble. The other time was deep-sea fishing when I was an adult and got violently seasick. I mention this not because fishing expertise is required to read Crow’s poems, but to suggest that their emotional force remains intact even at a considerable distance from the sport. Like Crow, I am a teacher and a parent. That shared terrain—more than any familiarity with rivers or fish—gives me a way into the book’s emotional center, which is to seek clarity in one’s life and to voice feelings that, if left unspoken, could quietly eat a person alive.

There is much to admire in Crow’s verse. He is sometimes humorous, sometimes deeply serious. He is adept with form, particularly the prose poem. There’s a sequence of them in the book’s second section, and each one is controlled and wryly self-aware. Crow skillfully deploys ordinary objects as structural anchors—pumpkins, pizza, ping pong, photos, and paperbacks. (I just realized this pleasing current of alliteration.) And one of his central metaphors, the elusive fish—like poetic language, like our most heartfelt desires, like the ideal relationships we seek with our loved ones, like meaning itself—always seems tantalizingly out of reach.

Rather than cataloging strengths (of which there are many), I want to focus on what I find to be one of the chapbook’s most authentic and moving thematic currents: the natural, and essential, pulling away of one’s child. I was struck by Crow’s ability to render this parental relationship tenderly but without veering into sentimentality. In “Consolation on the Susitna,” for example, the poet’s son—a digital native—has been “seduced” by his cellphone: “He doesn’t even realize he doesn’t read anymore.” Here, father and son travel to South central Alaska hoping to experience the sublimity of Denali, only to be fogged in, that magnificent encounter lost. The poem’s consolation arrives humbly: the father, who we know to be an English teacher, listens to the “thwt, thwt, thwt” of his son turning pages in their small cabin, a barely audible sound that soothes him momentarily, suggesting he must have done something right.

In another father-son-poem, “Playing Ping-Pong with My Son,” readers witness a masculine rite of passage: athletics. This poem is not really about parenting or reconnection, or even about instilling a love of a pastime, but about acknowledging one’s own mortality through a child—and doing so without self-pity, even with hints of pride and satisfaction. “Every time! He beats me every time / now—so different from just last summer,” the poem begins, comic and exasperated. The son is cast as the agile Cassius Clay; the father, an aging Sonny Liston. But the final lines carry the gravitas: “my teenage son—all sinew, bone, and easy / laughter—making his uncharted way / by burying me a little every day.” This poem opens almost with delight. It ends in wisdom. Isn’t that what Robert Frost insists a poem should do in “The Figure a Poem Makes”?

This awareness of mortality extends throughout Troutwatching and, once again, fittingly culminates in thoughts of Crow’s children. In another prose poem “The Years,” the poet imagines having “gathered the years” into plastic garbage bags and hoarding them in a spare room, a private archive he revisits when lonely—“say a Friday night when I have no other plans.” He then imagines his sons “entering this room after my death, groaning at the mess, wondering what I was thinking holding on to all this junk, and without thinking twice, throwing it all in a rented dumpster. Good boys. Thank you.” Even in this imagined afterlife, Crow seeks acceptance. His private attachments are just that: private. He understands the fact that his memories, his experiences, all the tangibles he has been hanging on to, will not matter in the same way to his children. Like the earlier poems about Denali and ping-pong, this, too, is loss wrapped in consolation—the faith that his sons will go on living in a world that no longer includes him. Here, again, the poet affirms the natural order of things, even offers his blessing: “Good boys. Thank you.”

The poems in Troutwatching, like beautiful fish, glimmer briefly on the surface before disappearing, the illumination they bring sparkling like a fragile bubble about to burst. What remains though is the pull to return—to read again, to linger a little longer, and then to take a deeper plunge. I’ll be venturing back into these waters again and again.