Roger Mitchell reviews
Vitals and Other Signs of Life
by David A. Goodrum

I often had a different kind of smile while reading David A. Goodrum’s collection Vitals and Other Signs of Life (The Poetry Box, 2024). His fearlessness, in the face of personal failure, in the face of aging, is remarkably even-keeled. "Regression Progression," as the poet phrases it, is a fine, complex way of putting what others would never dare be honest about:

            I am dreaming backwards
       to see where
             I thought I was headed.

[…]
To dig into
       What about me did I stop believing.

In the book’s 1st section, “Vitals,” Goodrum explores how closely he stays with his family, and how unpredictable life is with them as serious accidents, divorce, illness, death, and other goings-on occur. His turn toward the natural world in the third section is a saving move, but it's also a world he can't truly enter. I think of "Waiting for Discovery," as the kind of quiet anthem of the book (and provides language for the 3rd section’s title):

For it is almost the wakeful evening
and I am somewhere between

the sleep of roiling water
and the sleep of ice

Furthermore, "The Approach of Nothing,” which ends the 2nd section – “Fully Aware of the Falling Fistfuls of Dirt Still to Follow” – is a brave stroke of ultimate self-guidance:

               to seek a distant shore
     where passersby      who graze the night

     pulled by songs of rushing water
listen               unafraid

As Wallace Stevens said once, "Poetry helps people live their lives." Woefully understated, but the truth. Vitals and Other Signs of Life is essentially a life history and sees the world in stark but essential terms, having made thereby the speaker a heroic survivor. Not of the chest-beating type, but of the rigorously honest and truly brave kind. No one really writes like Goodrum: Tight, taut, but with much spatial, one might say dramatic, hesitation. In this first book written later in life, the poet has reached a high crest of awareness and poetic clarity.

Roger Mitchell is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Reason’s Dream (Dos Madres Press, 2018). Mitchell spent the largest part of his working life at Indiana University and for a time held its Ruth Lilly Chair of Poetry. He and his wife, novelist Dorian Gossy, live in Jay, NY.

David A. Goodrum, writer/photographer is the author of Vitals and Other Signs of Life (The Poetry Box, 2024) Recent publications include Tar River Poetry, Gyroscope, San Antonio Review, I-70 Review, Cirque Journal, Banyan Review, Tampa Review, among others. David lives in Corvallis, Oregon. See additional work (poetry and photography) at www.davidgoodrum.com.