- Authors
Charles Douthat
Charles Douthat is a poet, retired litigator and visual artist. His first book of poems, Blue for Oceans, won the PEN New England Award. His new book, Again, chosen by Peter Campion for Unbound Edition Press, is forthcoming in 2025. Born, raised and educated in California, Charles has lived in Connecticut for many years.
Praise for Again
Charles Douthat’s beautiful new book of poems, Again, is dedicated to the proposition that the family pool has no shallow end, that there’s nothing ordinary about the most ordinary of attachments, of child to parent, parent to child, or sibling to sibling. In an elegantly unadorned yet lyrical plain style, Douthat rec-reates the lost and troubled members of his childhood family so vividly that we feel not so much the pres-ence of the past as the heart wrenching pastness of the past, in all its unresolved and unresolvable com-plexity. This is a book impossible not to love.
Charles Douthat mines a deep vein of the meditative lyric that runs adjacent to the later poems of Wallace Stevens. With a soulful, intimate sustenato of memory and meaning, Again sifts through portraits of mother and father, sister and brother, all of them rendered in retrospect now, in living again, where the mundane everyday gains deeper resonance, tenderness, and sorrow. Douthat writes of living and dying, poem by poem, recalling the troubled (sometimes addicted) lives of a family, reaching in his final section a profound opening-out both of style and vista where—in memory and poetry’s paradox—there is “so much life afterwards.”
Elegiac, edged with humor and grace, Charles Douthat’s Again offers a sweeping vista of a California where “somewhere birds were thinking /of singing” and family dead speak again through memory. In these poems, you’ll find yourself in rooms so vivid you can touch their brass door-keys and feel the light on your own face. Douthat’s poems meditate on leaving, on last encounters, yet offer spaces of possibility and renewal. They show us a mind recounting the whole of a person, of a family in all its “hungers, angers and joys.”
Charles Douthat’s Again is a book of memory and second-thoughts. Nothing is ever as we once experi-enced it or thought of it—the deeper dive that art requires always leads to a new understanding, perhaps one we can barely apprehend, yet we receive it as a loving and life-giving spark. Each poem in this book is a sustaining spark, despite the grief and loss they overcome. Again is a book of clarity and serious power, wrought from long life and its restraints.
Lorca said that “the artist is one who takes the world into the self, sifts it through the self, and then gives it back to the world.” When the self that does that sifting conveys curiosity, tenderness and genuine com-passion, conveys those qualities with subtle craft, we receive ‘the world’ made luminous, the world re-deemed. In Again, Charles Douthat gives us poems that are morally and spiritually essential, that convey the very breath of life.
This is the book of poetry one prays for, rarely gets.
