Dandelions

As a high-school sophomore some forty years ago, I waded into Dave Etter's first book, Go Read the River. It opened up a world mostly unknown to the New-Jersey-native likes of me: the contemporary small-town American Middle West. I've since lived over half my life in my own versions of the Heartland but, thirty books later, Etter's poetry---by turns hilarious and tender (and, often, both at once)---continues to make it new all over again in this generous gathering of Dandelions.

His is a distinctly American music; the cadences of colloquial speech sound forth in Etter's jazzy, down-home hymns to those things he will not let go unspoken in his world: the rivers and Main Streets, willows and railroads, state fairs and carnivals, the ubiquitous all-seeing (if not quite all-knowing) neighbors. If I were Rod Serling, I'd be saying, "At the signpost up ahead: Welcome To Dave Etter's Illinois."

In the book's longest poem, `Yesterday I Heard the Rain,' Grandma's busy in Etter's kind of kitchen, cooking "fried eggs, bacon, grits, corned beef hash, / lots of strong black coffee." And all through Dandelions Etter dishes up his own hearly servings of whistle-clean, life-sustaining lines that might just be enough to get us through another day.

The opening poem, aptly titled `In the Morning When the Sun Comes Up,' beings with the speaker's promise: "I will do what I can do as long as I can do as long as I can do. "What Dave Etter can do absolutely is make poems that remind us what it means to be an engaged human being in this ever-nutty life---no matter where in the world we live. The poem ends with a heartfelt declaration: "I want so much to write the words I love forever." And that's exactly what we Etter readers---we gladiators in the cornfields both actual and imagined---want so much for him, too.

We who are not about to die salute him.

In Dandelions, the mighty river that is Ol' Man Etter just keeps rolling along.---David Clewell, St. Louis/January 2010

Dave Etter's "Dandelions," like William Carlos Williams' "Asphodel" are firmly rooted and then grow straight out of the native soil of this country. Etter's version of that Greeny Flower though, is loacated in the Midwestern country side, adjacent the "Big Muddy" river of Mark Twain and Richard Bissell, in America's rural heartland where his Dandelions "spread their brilliant colors" of all various and wondrous hues and stripes, nurtured and steeped in Blues music, Jazz, local history, family lore, place and region, and most importantly embodied in those people who populate all the forgotten river towns and rural hamlets where large portions of the essential American narrative is lived out by them day after day. Etter is a true American master whose poems in this volume, capture the splendor, the sorrows, the defeats, and the triumphs, all the tragedy and joy to be found in every square rooted and then grown quite naturally, out of the American heartland.---Philip S. Bryant, author of Sermon On A Perfect Spring Day and Stompin' at the Grand Terrace