John Amen’s Dark Souvenirs is exactly that: sixty poems that explore various kinds of darkness—addiction, suicide, and its attendant loss, denial, depression and the haunting of a human psyche and heart that is the ultimate result.

Early on, in “Foster,” one of the many short, terse and lyrical poems that comprise his book, Amen writes,
Black Richard & pale I spent our sugar years
stomping through woods in search of a devil.

The devil, as he says in another poem, wasn’t there, wasn’t available to blame for his brother’s decline and suicide. Like Thomas Hardy, he couldn’t look to Heaven, or in Amen’s case, to Hell, for a vengeful god or devil to blame. The result: years of endless mornings that were “warm chandelier[s] crashing to the floor.” And in “Two Years 2,” Amen says that he finds himself playing his brother’s baby grand, and agonizes, “two years & what comes home/to me every time is silence, & then more silence.”

Essentially, then, Dark Souvenirs is a moving and loving testimonial for Amen’s brother, a suicide by gun. No doubt about that: Amen’s sense of loss and devastation is proportional to his love for him. Beyond that, though, it also makes manifest an existential human quandary, whether on the macro or micro level, the quantum or the cosmic. Call it the ultimate existential paradox, which, at root, is what Dark Shadows is all about: the existential loss and the existential joy attendant to human existence. We weep and we smile, sometimes at the same time, and we despair and we hope—

Memory does its best
to salvage a keepsake
—pulp, bullet, bone,
a new constellation in the night sky—
but symbols are lost,
art fails, except as it screams at the dead.
I hope what remains of you
can recognize my voice.

We, as fellow suffering humans, and attentive readers, certainly—must—do. The pathos of those lines is ours, too.

To recap, John Amen’s Dark Shadows is an unapologetic excursion into grief, despair and, ultimately, recovery. As much as the content, or rather, what makes vivid the content, is the skilled techniques brought to the task by this accomplished poet:

The Subject: loss, its devastation, its memories, its haunting;
The Genre: mostly short, ironically lyric poems that propel the narrative;

The Methodology: often surreal and non-linear imagery, evocative language and wildly blossoming metaphors.

In a review of any collection of poems that are so personal as Dark Souvenirs, it is absolutely right and proper that the poet should be accorded the final word. In that spirit, then: In “Arc,” Amen, remembering his play-acting during his and his
brother’s “magnolia days,” writes,
When I put that gun to my temple,
I was playing.
You weren’t.

I submit that Dark Shadows is proof of that.

George Drew is author of nine poetry collections, including Pastoral Habits: New and Selected Poems and The View from Jackass Hill, winner of the 2010 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, both from Texas Review Press, Fancy’s Orphan, Tiger Bark Press, and most recently Drumming Armageddon, Madville Publishing, 2020