Böcker av Mike Dillon

In Mike Dillon's Close Enough, luminous scenes from a lifetime unfold through poetry and prose in a pilgrim's progress toward an I-Thou relationship with the world. The introductory poem, Kyoto, echoing the Japanese haiku master Basho, sets the tone: to stand in the heart of Kyoto/longing for Kyoto. Born in 1950, Dillon grew up with his father's silent legacy of combat in World War II. In the prose passage, Vietnam, he waits for the school bus with the other kids when an older boy, doomed to die in Vietnam, pulls a prank that thrills them all. And then: The school bus neared. The brakes scritched. The yellow door buckled open. And we all boarded for the same destination. For a little while longer. Against the backdrop of history, comes the author's personal search for the crossroads of time and eternity, where the there's a light "that carries/an unbroken thread./As it was. And is.Close Enough carries forward the resonant themes from Dillon's 2021 chapbook, The Return, from Finishing Line Press. British reviewer Matthew Paul, writing of The Return in Sphinx, noted that Dillon "seems to be seeking a silence just out of reach, bearing the influences of haiku, tanka, Chinese poetry and the likes of Snyder and Rexroth. At his sparest, his poetry takes on a rare limpidity worthy of those influences.

The narrative of poetry and prose begins on the eve of Pearl Harbor. An old Croatian fisherman rows across Eagle Harbor on Bainbridge Island to light the kerosene lamps to guide the ferries in, as he does each night. Christmas lights decorate the cottages scattered around the harbor. The lights of Seattle glow to the east. A star falls "from the wayside of infinity."The next morning, a Sunday, brings the bombing of Pearl Harbor.The owners of the Bainbridge Island Review, Walt and Milly Woodward, work into the wee hours to publish a special edition. Walt Woodward reminds his neighbors, "I am positive every Japanese family on the Island has an intense loyalty for the United States of America and stands ready to defend it." Up and down the West Coast, however, hatred is stirring.Little more than two months later, President Franklin Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066 authorizing the removal of people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast of the United States.On March 30, 1942, 227 Japanese Americans from Bainbridge Island, under bayonet guard, are marched aboard the ferry Kehloken bound for Seattle and a train waiting to take them to Manzanar, a barbed-wire camp in the central California desert. Many of their island neighbors turned out to see them off. Not a few of them weep.The author, using historical sources and family recollections, has crafted a poetic narrative of one of the most conspicuous injustices in American history, and explores how the healing goes on.