Not Now But Soon by Chris Dahl

Not Now But Soon

by Chris Dahl

winner of the 2024 Concrete Wolf Louis Award

MoonPath Press (imprint of Concrete Wolf), 2025

reviewed by Bethany Reid

While reading the poems in Not Now But Soon, I found myself imagining my own poems, all titled, Poem Beginning with a Line from Chris Dahl. Maybe from this assortment:

Foolish to try keeping something in / that wants out

cornmeal grief which uses both hands

when she laughs a door / opens and invites the wind in for tea

I woke to a geese convention

memory that flares / in my hand like a burning branch

Opening this book, I felt as though I had sat down with an old friend—from grade school, a cousin maybe, the sort of friend one grows up with. Picture us, two people, aging, losing parents, fearful for partners, worried about children. We’re struck by melancholy at times; at times, we’re dizzy with shared laughter. Remember the time…? And then…! Remember how she…? Even reading Dahl’s powerful and moving “The List of Griefs,” I had a sense of coming home.  

In the biographical note, Dahl describes her poetic process as “cupping her hand into a murky pond and offering the contents for examination: tadpoles and larvae, moss strands, algae, broken bits of leaves…” The poems indeed leap from one lucky find to another, not over-concerned by connections, but confident the reader will keep up. In “Hope for the New Year After One of Disasters,” the poem begins with cows in a barn, then shifts to an owl “sway-rocked in firs” calling someone we can’t quite imagine, then—

Who is she calling? Once,
last summer, a bear cub swam the lake

and came up our hill screaming
for its mother. There are times when each of us

is lost, when we long for some primal comforter
to rub our backs and whisper courage…

The poems are arranged in three sections: “The Bittersweet Season,” “The Fog-Swagged Hedges,” and “Liminal,” which is about the slow (and seemingly never finished) process of losing aging parents. In two of these late poems empty eggshells appear, first in “Taking Down the Christmas Ornaments,” a child’s handicraft:

Will my son even remember the blown-egg elf
he made in first grade? What a feat to keep it unbroken
all these years.

It’s too perfect a metaphor to abandon. A few pages later, “Sick on the Sofa Under a Heavy Blanket” begins, “There is a way that everything can stand for something else / if you only look closely.” As the poem continues, the challenge is to make sense of such fragile gifts:

The broken shell stands
as a reminder that each moment
is fragile, that the next stage begins
with destruction or emptiness.

Destruction or emptiness. “Or both,” I wrote in the margin.

I felt inspired to write poems by this poet–herself a generous reader. Her tributes include Cavafy (“Rereading Waiting for the Barbarians”), Auden, Tranströmer, Vonnegut, Arnold (“Reading ‘Dover Beach’ on New Year’s Day”), and Jimmy Buffet. The final poem—fittingly—pays tribute to Elizabeth Bishop, who wrote the inimitable villanelle on loss, “One Art.” Note in the excerpt below also a nod toward Dylan Thomas’s famous villanelle, “Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light.” Dahl’s “And On” is not overt, however, but begins with Bishop’s epitaph: “All the untidy activity continues awful but cheerful.” The first stanza opens with the closing three words, as if to chisel them in place:

Awful but cheerful. Not two poles, but a continuum.
We rage along its path longing to reconcile our losses.
Things break, get damaged, get lost, get thrown
into garbage middens, buried. A hundred
years go by, a thousand. A star winks out.
The universe unfurls at enormous speed
but we can’t distinguish the shift
even with aided eyes.

In another poem, “Aware of the Season’s Pivot,” we encounter this opening sentence: “We come to the time of year when we wake in the dark.” Perhaps a reader has to have reached their own season’s pivot, an age at which the losses are piling up and poised to pile yet higher. Don’t despair, this poet says (rubbing our back for courage). The poems of Not Now But Soon do not flinch from the truth that intimate connection with our dying loved ones will be devastating. But, the poems remind us, that journey can be weirdly cheerful, too. Watch for those parts—Dahl clearly does. The cover depicts her and her husband rowing away from us. I suspect she’s singing.

Bethany Reid’s latest book of poetry, The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm was published on January 1st of this year. Her other books of poetry, include Sparrow, which won the 2012 Gell Poetry Prize, and Body My House (2018).  Her poems, essays, and short stories have recently appeared in One Art, Passengers, Persimmon Tree, Constellations, and elsewhere, and her chapbook, The Thing with Feathers, was published in 2020 as part of Triple No. 10 by Ravenna Press. Bethany and her husband live in Edmonds, Washington, near their three grown daughters; she  blogs about writing and life at http://www.bethanyareid.com .

Concrete Wolf’s page on Chris Dahl, including a reading of her work on YouTube and ways to order