In his 16th full-length collection, a child walks in the dark (Small Harbor Publishing, 2021), Darren C. Demaree discovers the perfect form for content in the prose poem. It’s a collection about parenting children and children (including the titular child) speak in prose poems, in streams of consciousness, without coming up for air. Bracketed snatches of text from the first sentences provide the titles, as if in refusal or inability to step outside the breathless block of unpunctuated text and label, or define, in an authoritative manner.

Rather, like a good ecologist, Demaree interviews his children in their own language and their language permeates his discourse. Quirky, offbeat phrases like “summer is open” and terms like, “all-story” or “anti-swallowing” give the sense of collaboration with the parented in the process of parenting, the intimacy of a language shared between parent and child and the amount of lived experience Demaree himself has accumulated as a father. a child walks in the dark is a powerfully authentic testament. 

Capital letters and conventional punctuation don’t apply here. Every poem begins with the father’s “i told my children,” or “i told my daughter” or “i told my son” and every “I” is significantly a lower-case i, defeating the old paternalism. When he tells his children the second through fifth parts of their lives “will be learning how important it is to lower yourself  to make yourself a ramp to feed the rising of the people around you,” the father does so by example. He speaks at eye-level. He adopts their words instead of correcting them as somehow erroneous,  pioneering a more understanding, egalitarian model of fatherhood.

While Demaree’s father appears as a self-proclaimed alcoholic with “all those empty two-liter bottles of whiskey and ginger ale,” the confessional aspect of the book, with its implied self-centeredness, exists only to accentuate its father-work:

i told my daughter . . . please know it was your face i saw recurring while i was in rehab please know you are beautiful enough for me to be the opposite of the person I was born to be

The confession of alcoholism, too, heightens the poignancy of an apocalyptic awareness of impending environmental, or ecological, collapse. We can imagine it is the despair of the father that inclines him to the anesthetic of alcohol but also, as in the opening poem, “those junk plums,” to “celebrate the fact that there is still fruit in this world that won’t always be the case.” Environmentalism, feminism, and a total loving acceptance of his children as children pervade the book. Case in point:

[THERE IS ENOUGH YOUTH]

i told my son there is enough youth in you for all of us of course you can paint the wall with your helmet on while you stand on the bookshelf and shout-sing your favorite lines from under pressure which you learned from an animated movie where a koala sacrifices his whole past for one night of good art which yields him ruin and more art and you boy i don’t know why you got naked to do all of this but i suppose it does make sense to me on an elemental level son are you the new element some sort of fleshy stone that hums at a rhythm this family as not yet known yes yes yes you’re right david bowie and queen it’s all so incredible