Publisher: Homestead Lighthouse Press
Language: English
ISBN: 9978-1-950475-40-7
Although the title Destinations begins as an optimistic-looking word on the cover, this collection gradually piles a lot of weight onto it. Destinations relates literally to travel, (“I am an electric/ part of the landscape,/ charged with embodying/ all the forces nature/ provides”) and also figuratively to the progress of relationship and human growth. “I find the way to me through you./ You find the way to you through me.”
But, of course, we never really reach a destination, not with any finality, until more than halfway through the collection when destination is referred to with respect to illness and death. For example, in “Go Slow”: “as if death/ were the destination/ so why rush.”
This ninth poetry collection by Michael Favala Goldman includes sections on family and marriage, both featuring poems that highlight food as an element of unity/community. In “Seeds,” he writes,“I have a hard time understanding why I can’t buy your love with raspberries.” The second half of the collection in focussed on death and memory, human impact and insignificance. Death is not only due to war or global forces, but also something that happens to people we know and love. “The way you will die /changes daily,/ like traffic, weather,/body indexes, and/ trace mineral levels./ …You make your will/ and it is already outdated.”
The clutch of Greenland poems dominates the end of the book, with both groundedness and a feeling of timelessness, a metaphor perhaps for the individual. “The I in I is permeable,/ malleable, but also/ inherently/ indestructible.”
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