Derek Mong writes a poetry that’s part of a growing canon of fatherhood verse. Work made in the light of little children. Geffrey Davis, Benjamin Gucciardi, Niall Campbell, Dan Chelotti, Craig Morgan Teicher, Matthew Dickman—work that springs in part from the root offered decades ago by such books as Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares, or Robert Hass’s “Songs to Survive the Summer.” It’s still surprising enough to see a dad doing full-time parenting work—and to see that unfolding still constitutes a refashioning of what it means to be a man-identifying person. And probably will for quite some time. In Mong’s newest, When the Earth Flies into the Sun, part of what’s at stake is the kind of vulnerability—the sense that a father’s fears are eternal and bottomless:
There’s a music, too, to Mong’s lines, a music that sticks with you. The poet, for instance, imagines his child’s life if he were to die suddenly of the heart condition he’s just discovered he suffers from:
Long term readers will know that I’ve been negative on Britain for a long time. Corbyn was their last chance to turn things around, but Corbyn lacked the necessary ruthlessness to win, and was destroyed by absolutely bullshit allegations of anti-semitism. Starmer became Labour leader after him, on promises of left wing policies which even a child should have disbelieved, and ruthlessly purged Labour of all left wingers.
