Dining Al Fresco with My Dog, by Sue Fagalde Lick, Reviewed by Carol Barrett

Reviewed by Carol Barrett

Dining Al Fresco with My Dog
by Sue Fagalde Lick
MoonPath Press, 2024, 80 pages, $17.99
ISBN 978-1-7348739-8-6
Available at https://MoonPathPress.com

 

Book cover, Dining Al Fresco with my Dog

Sue Fagalde Lick’s book, Dining Al Fresco with My Dog, is the most distinctive collection of poems confronting the realities of widowhood that I have ever read. Time and time again these poems stun me with unexpected narratives, wrestle me wide-eyed with their frankness and wry humor, and enchant me with their bold take on seeming accidents of fate, encounter, and possibility. There is a woman across the street with whom the narrator exchanges the day’s litany (“Smoke Signals”). There is the neighbor advising her about her car (“Driveway Friend”). There is a visitor at a local eatery, looking very much like the poet herself (“Tuesday Lunch at Georgie’s”). There is a homeless woman requesting a ride (“Is Anyone Driving to Seal Rock?”).

A musician as well as poet, Lick infuses these poems with her acute listening ear, arranging stanzas as if transposing a musical score to a new key. She trusts her voice: I want to go where the trail leads (“Adventures Await”). The husband in these poems is never far off. The poet permits herself a range of emotion on his behalf, including annoyance that he has left her to handle both mundane and taxing tasks once in his domain (“Your Widow Reporting In”). Longing is there, along with the necessities of living solo in a small rural community. But so is joy. In “A Moment,” Lick captures the release of becoming one with nature:

lying here under yellow-green leaves backlit
against the cloudless sky, warm dog at my fingertips,
I feel light as the alder tree,
rooted here for eternity.

Her unabashed love of dogs is the focus of “Reunion,” but throughout the text the dog nudges us for attention. She is the poet’s steady companion in “Beach Run,” where Ocean, pewter yesterday, aquamarine today, changes with the tides.

Lick also makes room in this collection to honor her lineage, closing the book with the evocative “Poppies,” concluding I write the story that ends with me,/the last poppy, wide open to the sun,/ blackberry crumble almost done.

Part of the charm of this work is its unapologetic entrée into rural culture. Where is downtown, my mother used to ask / of my patch of ground in the woods (“South Beach, Oregon”). The reader can visit, take in Newport’s bridges and tourists, its places to both escape and celebrate routine. Back home, the poet dons her husband’s coveralls, claiming I’m protected from sun, spiders and dirt (“They Fit Like a Hug”).

Lick uses a range of perspectives to assist us in exploring her themes. She talks back directly to the wind in “Bully Wind.”  She recounts her solitary life in the third person in “Surveillance Report,” closing with End of shift report:/ Eats three times a day,/ keeps warm, still alive. She risks nudity in both the opening and closing poems of the first section (“Midnight Hot Tub”; “Spider Takes a Bubble Bath.”) She challenges winter in “Daring Winter,” leaving no doubt who will win the battle of the elements:

Just try to kill me. Go ahead,
Wrap your fingers around my throat. 

Squeeze. Feel your power melt away
For I am fire hot inside.

Indeed! This is a sizzling work of solitude insistently engaging a sometimes reluctant world.

Reviewer Bio:

Carol Barrett, Ph.D., began writing poetry to support the widowed women she was counseling. She has published three volumes of poetry, most recently Reading Wind, which was the third-place winner in the 2024 Poetry Box chapbook competition. Her first full-length collection, Calling in the Bones, won the Richard Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press. An NEA Fellow in Poetry, Carol has also published creative nonfiction, Pansies, a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards. She has lived in nine states and in England, and is currently at home in Bend, Oregon.

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