This collection of poems by Dane Cervine is a rich feast. An exploration of the joys and exigencies of family, commitment, parenting and deeply sensual love. We journey through an infinite variety of emotions and observations penned from an amazingly open heart. The lyric quality of this work delighted me.
—the poet Maude Meehan
What A Father Dreams: Poems of Family, Love, & Aging brings together in one volume many of the poems regarding family life previously seen in Dane Cervine’s chapbooks, or published in journals and anthologies. The poems trace his experience as a father through the wonder and travails of raising two children—from budding adolescence back to the early days of birth. In addition, there are poems celebrating the intricacies for parents of love, sex, the losing and finding of each other repeatedly through the exhausting, but ultimately fulfilling course of family life. Finally, there are poems contemplating aging parents, including death and the discovery of self late in life.
With an eye for the nuance of emotions that vibrate just beneath the daily deluge of parenting obligations, Dane Cervine brings an observant, lyrical tone to his work that emanates from his background as a Marriage & Family Therapist, and his role as Chief of Children’s Mental Health for Santa Cruz County. In these poems, there is recognition of the tensions inherent in modern family life—as in the opening poem Husbandry—as well as the omnipresence of awe veiled in the innumerable details of everyday life.
Poetry, like therapy, is an act of consciousness—implicit in its offering is the opportunity to become whole through embracing one’s darkness and light in the same moment, or the same poem. What A Father Dreams is an offering of poems bent on brokering this sense of awe in the simple act of leading a conscious family life.
