Dean Kuipers Reviews Chris Dombrowski's Ragged Anthem

At Los Angeles Review of Books, Kuipers begins his review of Ragged Anthem thinking about the durability of our nation and the various ways that Dombrowski and other writers have reflected on it: "we understand from the photo of the red-white-and-blue car door on the cover that we all own it, and we’re all invited to bring whatever we’ve got." From there: 

There is specific trouble, like deaths too intimate and suicide too tempting, and then there is the recently refreshed, universal disquiet about ourselves as Americans, the trouble fellow Montanan Thomas McGuane identified when he wrote the opening line to 92 in the Shade: “Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic.” The difference being we have a pretty good idea now. We are all living there.

An anthem is somewhat impossible at this moment, so of course it would be ragged. “Listen,” he says in the final lines of “I’m working on a building,” “the good dog at the back door is either whining or / you’re crying to yourself. The start of a song.”

It’s our song, yours and mine, but the details are Dombrowski’s and they reveal a rural life that defies and transforms the assumptions we bring to the countryside. He grew up fishing and hunting in Michigan and now lives with his wife and children in or near Missoula, where he teaches and works as a fly-fishing guide. My own father used to delight in referring to the University of Montana there as the “dance school,” redrawing the same hard moral lines between things that are useful or rooted in the earth and those that are urban and thus frivolous (like poetry, I guess), but you won’t find any of that in these poems. Here is an excruciatingly familiar contemporary life of parenting and regret and questions about one’s own sanity and behavior. The images of river and grassland and pheasant-flavored wind which pour through these poems are gorgeous, and frame a place and an idea so beautiful that people would defend it with their last breath, but they also display our madness in wild relief like a city can’t.

Read more at LARB.