"Impossible Flying" is Dawes' most personal and universal
collection, 'telling family secrets to strangers'. There are
moments of transcendence, but often there is 'no epiphany, just the
dire cadence of regret' since the failures of the past cannot be
undone, and there is no escape from human vulnerability, the
disappointment of hopes, bodily decay and death. From that bleak
acceptance comes a chastened consolation, and as for poems, 'they
are fine and they always find a way to cope/they outlast
everything, cynical to the last foot.' The family secrets focus
primarily on the triangular relationship between the poet, his
father and younger brother, though in "For Mama" there is a
heartfelt and deeply moving acknowledgement of the rocklike
unconditionality of a mother's love and care for her family's
wounded souls. As ever with Dawes' collections, the rewards come
not only from the individual poems, but also from their careful
arrangement, internal conversations and from the overarching
meanings that emerge from the architecture of the four sections.
"Legend" begins the exploration of family mythology and the special
place of the youngest brother and the hubristic hopes invested in
him. "Estimated Prophet" gives context to the process of the
brother's descent into madness and their father's collapse into
despair and premature death in the condition of Jamaica in the
1980s when cold war politics and tribal wars brought an end to the
dreams of the socialistic 70s, 'that valiant, austere decade'. Here
the comic vision of the first section cannot be sustained in
writing about 'those chaotic seven years of dust'. This section
also deepens the counter-discourse of self-reflection on the act of
writing the poems: the confessions of impersonation ('I have stolen
much...') and the ambivalent space between history and myth in the
filtering of memory and constructed family narratives. The third
section, "Brother Love" is set in the present and deals with the
renewal of relationship with the brother and the guilty respite of
being away 'from the long lament', with marriage, children and 'the
peace and constancy/of new homes, while old homes seem/to crumble
about us.' The last section, "For My Little Brother" explores the
difficult dialogue between these two worlds, between a past that is
unalterable and a present that is shaped by it, but that contains
its own possibilities. "Impossible Flying" is deeply felt writing
that has an intensity and tautness which, if not new in Dawes'
work, rises to new levels of eloquence. It is impossible to read
this collection without feeling that one's consciousness of what it
means to be human has been immeasurably deepened, or without
wanting to constantly return to the poems.
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