Downstate

By: David Gardiner

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The poems in Downstate recount journeys from David Gardiner's native Chicago & Polish neighborhoods of his childhood, to the Southern territories of his distant American past, to the contemporary Ireland where he has lived over the past twenty years. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: "The truth is, that, every half century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ...

ISBN	978-0-9561287-3-7
Pub Date	Sunday, February 01, 2009
Page Count	68
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The poems in Downstate recount journeys from David Gardiner's native Chicago & Polish neighborhoods of his childhood, to the Southern territories of his distant American past, to the contemporary Ireland where he has lived over the past twenty years. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: "The truth is, that, every half century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors. Human blood, in order to keep its freshness, should run in hidden streams, as the water of an aqueduct is conveyed in subterranean pipes." Gardiner's work does not forget his ancestors, who extend back proudly through past the Civil War in America on one side, and to twentieth-century Poland on the other. These poems explore a rich subterranean heritage uniting the cities and landscapes in which he has lived and worked stretching from Dublin to Chicago to New York uniting pasts & presents as families break and build again.

David Gardiner

Dr. David Gardiner is a poet, editor and professor who was born and raised in Chicago. From 2006 to 2010, he was the founder & editor of the international arts journal, An Sionnach, which published Van Morrison, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Paula Meehan and Eamonn Wall, among others. He attended the first Writers’ Workshop at University College Galway under the direction of Gerald Dawe and was taught there by Thomas Kilroy, John McGahern, Richard Murphy, and others. For over ten years, he directed the Creighton summer program at Trinity College Dublin. He has authored over sixty journal publications, edited over twenty five journals and volumes, and written five books, including the Salmon poetry collections Downstate (2009) and The Chivalry of Crime (2015). He is currently Director of the Center for Irish Studies and Editor of The New Hibernia Review at the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, MN).

The Heartland

We live among the half wild houses,
trailers sunk in concrete;
converted carports

out here among the horse people,
tight hacking groups who burn their grass.
Their white-headed colt watches me

walking the dog, starting the car,
turning the blinds of our back room
at night, against the flash of a neighbor's motion light.

We're bypassed out here on Old 51.
Trucks roar toward Memphis
trains whistle in the 3 a.m. distance.

Not a porchlight turns on these things
we're not concerned with. Everyone's
at home. In the blue-curtained light

there's little to tell us where we are;
little to tell us that we're on the margin,
little to tell us anything,

until late at night,
the last train to New Orleans past,
we hear the one,

persistent bark of a coyote,
and roll again into unremembered dreams.

Copyright David Gardiner 2009

Review by Richard Tillinghast, The Irish Times, Saturday May 16th 2009

Some parts of the United States are familiar to Irish people. Boston is well-known as an Irish city, and at Christmas the NYPD Choir can be relied upon to be singing Galway Bay. But the Midwest, despite being explored by at least a few Irish poets including Eamonn Wall, the late James Liddy and the Irish-American Thomas Lynch, remains terra incognita for many, even in the US. This is the territory David Gardiner claims as his own. In Bungalow Belt he writes, "I was born, raised in Brute, Oblivion . . . . I come from a neighbourhood where 'regular' / Was the supreme compliment . . .".

While properly cognisant of the Midwest's relentless insistence on conformity and homogenisation, "the vacuum that all our pasts are becoming", Gardiner is particularly attuned to the vividness brought to this levelling culture by what is known curiously in America as "ethnic", ie not the familiar identifications such as Wasp, Irish, African-American, but Italian, Polish and less familiar Eastern European nationalities.

He is a connoisseur of "Polish facades and Spanish billboards"; in Imaginary Mazurkas he reports, "At night, I look for the big-kettled kitchens". He likes the bartender in the club car on the commuter train who "learned to speak English twenty-seven years ago / From Old Mr. Boston's De Luxe Bartending Guide ".

Second Street Pesach evocatively blends memories of Catholic and Jewish ancestry; of his great-grandmother, he writes: "Her silence knew the Kishinev pogrom. / Her husband was still; a picture in the bedroom mirror - / in a prayer shawl, standing in important pose, / obscured by the lacey dress of the Child of Prague".

Review: The Midwest Book Review, October 2009

In every community, there are countless bloodlines that compose that society. Downstate is a collection of poetry discussing people and their heritage. Author David Gardiner reflects wistfully on society and its reverence for its heritage; "Downstate" is a fine, insightful, and entertaining volume.

Plains storm, Omaha

Around here, a truck's rumble past is
as natural as wind that rocks the porch swing in your absence.

'God doesn't give his thunder to us all.'
We tell ourselves we're lucky; with our daylilies and dogwoods

we're the stuff that survives, has roots and mind
enough not to stick our heads above neighboring flowers.

The winds, the sirens, and the early bathtimes
all fall together to make our long horizons,

hang together as the front porchswing rocks
with silhouettes of wild roses waiting for the storm.

The front of a life that blows in from elsewhere.