In these vibrant poems of identity, nostalgia, generational change, family, and American culture, Goodrum exhibits a true talent for imbuing mundane details with authenticity, layered meanings, and linguistic beauty. But Vitals and Other Signs of Life is so much more than that; it's also brimming with deep longing, pain, and the kinds of contrasts that speak to larger human truths. Filled with rich and accessible language, these poems are intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging, written by someone with clear eyes and an open, curious heart.
-John Sibley Williams, author of As One Fire Consumes Another
In the middle of Indiana I slept / among the long dead and the always dying, writes David Goodrum in this forthright debut collection. In poems both pensive and rich with metaphor, Goodrum grapples with an austere, midwestern childhood, memories of close calls and a father quick to punish. We witness the ebb and flow of life's 'vitals'-dementia and death, marriage, divorce, the terrifying illness of a child. Yet Vitals is ultimately hopeful. The poet eventually leaves Indiana, and as an avid gardener, learns to nurture what he has planted in his new home: Don't transplant bad habits from one bed to another, he realizes. Embrace the red thorns. Vitals and Other Signs of Life takes a brave look at one man's red thorns, transforming the truth of them into beautifully wrought poems.
-Emily Ransdell, author of One Finch Singing
Vitals and Other Signs of Life plunges us into the dark recesses of memory as he recounts a boy's experience of injury and trauma, repression, illness, loss, and death. He continues in the bald language of witness with a close look at his own frailty, and the dwindling that is aging. But in the third section, he waits not for the dream of bone / but of marrow-where we wrap ourselves in dark woolen moods...gape at the bright bits of light glinting. His embrace of the natural world pulls into his lines the robins who thin the clew (of worms), windows juddered by the wind, and a tree turned ninety / with dark spalted threads running through. Here, his voice expands; his words begin to sing.
-Rachel Barton, author of This is the Lightness and Happiness Comes
A third of the way through this book, David Goodrum gives us an account of his methods. In "Letter of Introduction," he writes, I offer double vision: shoplifted / recollections declared as my own / while mine, haphazardly / evaporated, are raked for crystal residues. The tone is characteristically self-deprecating, but the analysis pinpoints a key strength of the poetry that precedes and follows. The astonishing first poem, "My Brother Jumped from the Fire," reconstructs the brother's mental experience amid choking smoke: my brother knew he had to / pick up the cleaning.... // knew he had to drive his daughter / to flute practice.... After keeping us within the brother's consciousness through his plunging three stories, the poem pulls us abruptly into the poet's perspective-seeing, but not recognizing, his hospitalized brother on the national news.
Whether through catastrophe or slow erosion, the life rendered in this poetry accumulates losses. But Goodrum's sharp attentiveness to the natural world and his double vision sustain him. In "Turning Over," a poem that articulates his methods through an extended metaphor of cultivating a garden, the speaker notes drily, Though well past bloom / I'm still working it. Reading the poems in these pages, I feel nourished by the harvest his persistent hand-tilling has produced.
-Eleanor Berry, author of Works of Wildfire
