DARRELL PARRY: A POET WITH A TWIST...OR TWO...OR THREE

 Note: Please click on photos to enlarge

Look closely, can you see the resemblance? Look closer! If you can see the resemblance it’s likely because you have a very strong, suggestible mind. You see, the resemblance has absolutely nothing to do with hair, glasses, other features that you can see. Perhaps you wouldn’t even be able to “see” it if you read darrell parry’s poems and my expressions.

They are drastically different…On the surface. Beneath language shells, word blankets, and phrasing lids is where you’ll find the kernel, the heat of connection, the “real” shit cooking…in my world…and with the stipulation that he’s writing from within, in darrell’s world as well. Perhaps he’ll forgive me for using this response to Twists: Gathered Ephemera (by Parisian Phoenix Publishing, 2021) to soapbox a little. I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

If you’d told me that I’d be seeing myself in darrell parry and vice versa prior to reading Twists, the title poem, I might not have said, “Get the bleep outta here,” but I suspect a sliver of skepticism might have slipped through my façade. The only inkling I could have had were the eyes. His eyes. You see, they see, and I could see that while seeing him. Even on Zoom.

And the way he sees is not common. darrell lets you know that right off the bat in Twists, when he writes,

“You are not like the others.”

These words please me

The poem then winds its way to darrell professing that he does things the “wrong ways,” ways that I suspect he really means are the “right ways” from his perspective. Is there a perspective that matters more? It sounds to me that he’s saying, “what is ‘right’ to you isn’t necessarily ‘right’ to me, and the straight and narrow that you recommend does not tumble my river rocks nearly as much as the way I flow.”

Because the way he flows leads him to:

“…places that I love,

places that bring me peace,

places that the others do not want to go

because they are not like me.”

Why do I feel like darrell’s my twin, speaking for me? Because if I wrote like he did, I could write the exact same thing.

But even before the wide grin smearing my face after the first poem in the collection, what I’m calling an "epigraph" had coaxed a smile:

Yep, given darrell's comments at Zoom venues, I figured I was in for some crooked smiles.

If I wasn’t sure about darrell’s…uh…orientation? Perspective? Poetic bent? after the “epigraph” and first poem, once I had read The Perfect Shade of Weird, I was sure that I was in the presence of an observer of humanity, a philosopher who had come to grips with his own difference from the norm, from the rest, and would not be shaken…at least in his poetry. I just now read …Weird again and I couldn’t choose an excerpt that would do, so please click on the photo for me, will ya?

Okay, there is so much richness in the collection that I feel I ought to be writing several pages. But the work really speaks for itself. I will offer a few details before I wrap this response up though. 

You’ve got 39 poems spread across four unequally divided sections- you didn’t expect uniformity from darrell, did you? There are poems to chuckle to (see Vacuuming in the Dark, On Men and Beasts), poems to make you look away in wonder (The Bus Poem, Modern Art), poems that threaten to exhume the bodies of your love and un-love lives (Sock Drawer, Words), and poems that mine the mundane in novel ways (How Did Nora Do Today, Old Shoes).  

Several of the poems in Twists are akin to diamonds buried beneath the backyard anthill where you have to think a bit to get to them…except, in the end, you really don’t have to do much work to get it with DP. I finished reading Old Shoes, and thought, “Peeling a fruit might not offer much delight- except in anticipation- but once you get to the succulent flesh it makes the less-than-thrilling peeling so very worth it.”

And that, in essence, was my experience of reading darrell parry’s Twists: Gathered Ephemera. Sure, there was a healthy dose of sardonic humor, but what else would you expect from a guy who plays with devils. In poem after poem, there was something juicy to savor- even if you had to wait for the twist at times. Asked to sum up the collection, I might say something like, "It's lemon-drop poetry- hard and grainy on your tongue, where tangy and sweet fornicate to produce spurts of ecstasy."  

Although not darrell's favorite, the following piece was definitely one of mine. Here's my rendition of Haunted by darrell parry: