Reviewed by Adisa Vera Beatty
In his fifteenth poetry collection, Gomer’s Song, Kwame Dawes comes up on the reader like an insistent scent, haint, or force of nature. Giving voice to Gomer, the saved harlot wife God told the prophet Hosea to marry, we are taken on a sojourn of desire, forgiveness, and freedom with a woman unlikely to be forgotten. In the span of forty-four poems Dawes simultaneously resurrects and creates a mythic woman with such poignancy that you never doubt her existence. And so with lines like, “I was born for this story” Dawes anoints the reader a believer.
Told in three sections, Gomer’s Song begins with the widely accepted and comfortable knowledge about Gomer; she was a loose and unrepentant woman. What we are not comfortable with is all that Dawes brings us with Gomer’s Song; the difficulty of need, the price of freedom. In the poem Repentance Gomer contemplates the well-traveled path she’s allowed her desire to blaze:
Then the blood begins to return
to stiffened limbs, and the room grows,
curry yellow before the brown
of regret. In this hiatus, I am clean
as a confessor, able again to rebuild
that new fiction of redemption.
And sated like this, it is easy
o say this will be the last
faceless man’s basic desire,
the last pathetic stranger
to seep into me; that tomorrow
a new woman will begin
to rebuild the wreckage of her life.
But helpless and victim are two things this Gomer is not. Dawes plots out the complex geography of his Gomer who is at times an audacious and haughty conjurer who uses her sexuality like she’s working a root. Then at other times she reveals what is beneath her surface; that no one knows her or her true story. Gomer was given the title of wife and mother, was shown mercy, but only she can give herself salvation. We stumble with Gomer like all sinners do as she shrugs the place she has been assigned from her body like an unwanted garment.
By section two there is the acknowledgement of damage, shame, and the relief that comes with receiving mercy. In poems like “Certified,” “Husband,” “Times Seven” and “The Wounds I Have Made” Gomer not only confesses to seeking something outside herself, but also has difficulty accepting that she is worthy of forgiveness in spite of her failings. “Times Seven” alludes to the Bible and God’s command that you should forgive times seven. And it is forgiveness that this Gomer rails against and leans into.
TIMES SEVEN
The woman coming through the trees,
the speckled light of dusk
on her skin, is your love
returning again to be forgiven
with tears in her face;
embrace the broken woman.
When we leave Gomer she continues to linger with us like the memory of her past deeds remains with her. In the poem “Punishment” we see that Gomer cares deeply for what she once devalued; her husband, children, herself.
“Still I battle my appetite with fasts and carry the weight of guilt on me. But this is not freedom, not the birthright of bloodshed and broken flesh. I receive the bargain of ages and turn to face my fragile collateral: the husband, the children, these words, still intact, still within my reach–against this debt I cannot repay.”
Gomer’s Song is a lyric of love, self-love, and the give and take of forgiveness and liberation.