Catalogue of Surprises
Poems

What reviewers say:

"Dorothy Wall's poems are like flagstones we step upon to travel forward and backward in time; she casts a wide-ranging eye on life above ground and '…life now underground and shaken.' Her poetry is precise and musical, it leaps and turns and grounds us to place. Dorothy Wall offers us refuge and renewal when she says, 'beauty… is everywhere the sky is.' This poetry possesses the skill of an engraver, and the broad brush strokes of a fine artist."
— Joseph Zaccardi, Marin County, California poet laureate (2013-15)”

"The poems in Dorothy Wall's Catalogue of Surprises acknowledge impermanence, mortality, and such existential dilemmas as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, but Wall does not cave under the weight of these realities. She says, '...we are furiously holding out our hands / with their stone of hope / we won't let go,' and shows us that life itself is a catalogue of surprises where, holding our fury and hope, we can look at clouds and relish 'something bright or illuminated / above us.' The poems are elegantly crafted and radiate a light of their own."
— Lucille Lang Day, author of Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place, and >Becoming an Ancestor: Poems

"In Catalogue of Surprises, Dorothy Wall compares words to 'a suspension bridge // a rope we've tied ourselves to / above the chasm.' Her wise poems look clear-eyed deep into the chasm — at illness, family history, despoliation, and mortality. At the same time, she finds beauty in the most unexpected places: pebbles, snail-trails, or the animals of Chernobyl thriving without us. You will find beauty, too, in Dorothy Wall's exquisitely crafted poetry."
— Susan Cohen, author of Throat Singing, A Different Wakeful Animal, and Democracy of Fire

"Throughout her newly released poetry collection, Dorothy Wall demonstrates the ability to fuse language both concrete (e.g., "refrigerator on the freeway" and a "baby born in [a] bomb shelter,") as well as abstract (e.g. "hope," "absurdity" and, as in the title poem, "surprises," "plans," "accidents," and "acquisitions.") This range from nominalism to idealism, where many times along the continuum words intersect both worlds (as in "shelter"), is an earmark of Wall's work in this collection, making it appealing to both die-hard students of post-modern poetry and the occasional reader who needs tone and conversational language in order to stay with it."
— Terry Lucas, poet and reviewer at The Widening Spell, A weblog of poetry's capacious connections.
Read the full review here

"Writing as both a grandmother and a great-granddaughter and everything in between, Dorothy Wall addresses her (our) time on the planet with a potent mixture of despair and hope. As she advises herself in 'Where to Find Hope': 'Skeptical self, please believe in the possible / against evidence.' Conviction, if not optimism, always wins out. She concludes the poem: 'What we do next is what matters.'....

She also writes lovingly about her mother and her grandchildren. 'My Grandson Wants to Go to Chernobyl' is a poem about recovering from apocalyptic disaster that celebrates her grandson's courage and curiosity along the way....

Dorothy Wall recognizes the need, buoyed by what may be naive wishing, to persevere against all odds. Climate change is real; cataclysmic events happen all the time, regular as clockwork; species are vanishing all around us, every day. But as she writes in 'Towhee on the Flagstone' about yet another fragile, vulnerable being, we must 'take the long view / that's our job these days / two in the bush worth / more and / more.'"
— Charles Rammelkamp, The Lake
Read the full review here

From Catalogue of Surprises:

Hemingway Puts Down His Gun

I read the story somewhere, how each day
he tried to stop writing when he knew

what came next

As long as words, strong as a rope
hauled him into another day

he knew he'd keep going
If you ever thought words can't save us

think again: a string of words
a suspension bridge

a rope we've tied ourselves to
above the chasm

You'd think I'd understand this rope-pulled
undertaking, this aerial act, but I don't

this trusting at the edge that requires
trusting yourself, now that's

scary. Below the river flits from green
to blue, darker at the bend

where words end
until

***

Originally published in Talking River Review, Fall 2020, Volume 49
Copyright © Dorothy Wall, 2020. All rights reserved.

Refrigerator on the Freeway

Traffic report, "Morning Edition," NPR

All the scattered calamities we leave
behind, those migrations leaving their trail

of chaos, saltwater intrusion in Louisiana
marshes, ice-free winters in the Bering Sea

another spring of beeless
trees, the heave of a king tide over

washed-out walks, but who can slake
that thirst raking through each of us.

Someone is waiting for their refrigerator.
Wandering and unplugged, we’re left

to find a new route home
like that Atlantic gannet off the coast

of San Francisco who may
or may not remake its world. To you

still searching for your appliance
it will arrive soon

humming, latched, so you
can believe in repair.

***

Between

Before departure, the last
boarding, why not visit
a long cool night, a nameless street
my father's razored haircut
his thin indecipherable scar.
I stared and stared at the base
of his skull where the scalpel
left its clean swift bite.
From the backseat as he drove
our '57 Chevy, I wondered at its
delicacy, a thin white line down
his bare neck I now know
is the line between life and
death that deft hands navigate
as we steer our way
dipping hands into bodies
briefly.

Some evenings I wonder how much is left.
Some evenings I watch the sky, each grey
horizon, fog bank, darkness
advancing as the mind does
or the surgeon's hands finding
exactly where the tumor lay
one deed allowing another as if
there's a purpose though I don't believe
there is. We wonder at imperfection
then at what is saved, which includes
in this case me, that car ride
that scar that says someone
touched the living flesh
inside, sutured tight two flaps
to close the mystery
and leave.

***

Catalogue of Surprises Poems