Dustin Pickering

Imitations of Love Poems Dustin Pickering

It is a rare occasion in the publishing industry to see a book that reflects two minds writing on separate planes about the same topics. Imitations of Love Poems is the heart and mind bared on the topics of love, religion, conscience, youth, life, and film. The poetry of Dory Williams opens the collection with a childlike vision of the world. God is seen as the perfect form of Love. Williams' use of language, irony, and common sense proverb leads the angels of our understanding into a world that is beautiful and tricky, but also wonderful and kind. She writes, "The rights of children are our rights." The seemingly buoyant style Williams introduces is the product of a cheerful mind often fraught with sadness and the love of man and God. Her worldview, expressed ironically with wit, is that romantic love is the highest state of love given by God. Dustin Pickering takes an alternate approach to the same questions. His tribute poems are dark and sophisticated, thick with allegory and grief. His poetic stance is one of darkness, of facing love in the winter. His approach to God is far less conventional; it is even mystical. He conveys a direct sense of whom or what God is while defining human nature in terms of its relation to truth. Truth becomes an icky concept with lines like: "Yet vain hopes are all I have held. / Her breasts so lush were vanity revealed." Pickering, in defining human nature, wants freedom from it. He hopes to be genuine and perfectly altruistic but the darker strain in human nature is impossible to overcome. This collection of verse by two disabled poets promises its reader an awakening in how disabled people survive in loneliness, difficulty, and dependence. As America takes interest in the plight of the disadvantaged, Imitations of Love Poems is an important collection to peruse with pleasure and sympathy. Love, in its universality, is also stunningly individual in its expression.