Traced throughout The Second O of Sorrow are Dougherty’s devastating reflections on his wife’s illness. Alternating between beautiful odes to love and grim observations on what it means to be fighting for life in this country, these poems are their own sort of metaphor for the Rust Belt ... In the midst of his grief and anxiety, Dougherty puts forward expressions of startling beauty ... Work and pool hall laughter, love and the horror of death and loss. Dougherty lays it all out in this collection, and he does so on the tarnished and diveted table of Ohio.
The poems are replete with rundown towns, futures, people and relationships, and yet it’s an awe-inspiring collection that shows how a skilled hand can find light in the darkest things ... There’s a sense of earned grace to the language of these poems. Sometimes he pushes the boundaries with ornate statements ... Yet he’s never talking beyond the reader. In every moment where plain speech hits a transcendent pitch, the poetry makes room for the reader to walk alongside. It’s both a humble and confident ... beautiful language.
As I read these poems I thought of Peter Handke’s brilliant, tortured, autobiographical novella, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams ... The Second O in Sorrow, cannot be defined by one subject or variations on themes of pain, but branches out into other directions readers of Dougherty’s considerable body of work will recognize. There is a long poem of regret and love in the relationship of a man with his son and the spaces between them that are larger than a generation. There is Sean at a karaoke night in a bar ... He defines poetry in a unique way that is both intimate and informative, visceral and real ... What more could you possibly want from a writer?
Sean Thomas Dougherty’s most recent collection of poems...succeeds most of all in elucidating beauty, even among what is ugly, even among what is disheartening and difficult for a reader to face. In this, he finds moments of transcending what could be considered 'ordinary' and rendering it 'extraordinary.' The manner in which the poems move assumes a sense of the transience of a day, and yet the turning over of a new one ... Dougherty sees what is gritty and unfortunate in the world he moves through and brings it back 'to shape a breath' ... This book will lead you to the core of what is real and true, in both heartbreaking and captivating ways.
Words may not change the living conditions of our violent country—they certainly cannot change our mortality, the loss that comes heavy with the death of a loved one—but they can be held up to the wound, measured against it, and provide one with a sense of togetherness. Others have wounds of the same shape who have survived to weave words that gleam. With The Second O of Sorrow, Dougherty has made something beautiful for us that does not erase the pain, but shares it with us, lets us know we do not hurt alone.
