A Review of If I Were God I Would Also Start With Light by Gardner Dorton
Written by Nicole Kowalewski
Reading Gardner Dorton’s If I Were God I Would Also Start With Light is a religious experience. I say this not because of the many allusions to Biblical myth and the depths of contemporary Christianity but because of Dorton’s power to both intoxicate and appall with a single sentence; to read his work is to discover poetry itself all over again.
Dorton’s debut collection of verse is eclectic in form and source, drawing inspiration from artwork and music, myth and reality. He begins with a series of questions sourced from a Baptist church survey in “Baptism Questionnaire,” using the prompts– “How has your life changed since coming to faith in Christ? Where do you see evidence of God's grace at work in your life?” (24-26)– as springboards for vividly intimate free verse. He answers these queries with questions of his own and parallels Biblical violence with adolescent suffering, often involving queer identity: “What if I am still afraid of men?/The man unloading the clip of his gun/at the moon because it looks like his mother./The one who pulled out his penis and asked/remember it?” (27-31). Religion, we are reminded, is full of blood as well as beauty; so is our experience with it. Dorton’s language is a defiance of propriety, dissolving expectations of straightforward paths and easy forgiveness.
In this first quarter of the collection, hardly a poem goes by without some allusion to faith, or lack thereof; Dorton constantly evokes devils and gods, angels and prophets. He juggles mysticism and jagged shards of reality, weaving in references to Greek mythology as well as Christian. These range from clear-cut metaphors– “I am a part of a country/that only survives by dropping/hot suns over everywhere else./My country, save me from Hermes’/bouquet” (“Anthropocene,” 24-28) to more subtle allusions, such as “I stood frozen as a pillar of midnight,/wearing her black dress. A pillar of salt and woman” (“Boy,” 3-4), a reference to the Biblical tale of Lot’s wife, who was transformed into a pillar of salt for looking back upon the sinful city of Sodom (considered by some to be deemed “wicked” by God for the sin of homosexuality). Thus, Dorton builds his own mythology of creation and destruction centered around the experience of queer youth.
As the collection progresses, so do the images Dorton evokes. Religion retreats slightly from the spotlight, leaving room for the inherent spirituality of adolescence and sexual discovery to creep in. “Inside the Steeple” is an eloquent marriage of the two, crossing the line between childhood fantasies of romance with adult relationships. Religious threats hang over the speaker’s shoulder– “Before then, a man became a bludgeon,/hell-bent on teaching Gomorrah. Said,/God said so” (10-12)– and Lot’s wife returns (27); the speaker longs for more from a lover and asks “Will I/also know a torso ripe enough/to touch?” (29-31).
The second half of If I Were God (…) ushers in this change in full effect, focusing more on the body, the self, and their contradictions. Dorton highlights both the suffering one’s body can cause– he begins the book’s second section with a mental health questionnaire focused on self-harm– and the gifts it brings through physical intimacy and the simple act of being. The pitfalls and small, strange joys of living within oneself as well as within the world are embedded in his lines; he finds richness in “Eating Over the Trashcan,” immortalizes overlooked joys in “Praise.”
Many of Dorton’s epistolary poems in this latter half may be categorized as love poems, but to label them as anything so simple is to ignore the intricacies of his themes. His language is lovely and rich, to be sure, but it contains multitudes; the more one looks, the more one sees. The final piece in If I Were God is one such example. “Second Sunrise” is a soliloquy of beauty, devotion, and the fierce vibrancy of things that must come to an end; its last lines, “Hold out your hands,/cup them,/and see what you are given” (24-26) seem to invoke a plea for openness, or perhaps tentative hope. It also calls back to the tradition of Christian communion, bringing the collection in a full circle. Take what is offered, and nourish yourself– when meeting Dorton’s poems, readers will happily oblige.
If I Were God I Would Also Start With Light
Published by Thirty West Publishing House
88pgs
Paperback: 979-8-9895422-6-0 | September 2024 | $16.99 (lower presale price)
Nicole Kowalewski is currently earning her BFA in Creative Writing at Roger Williams University, which houses the Mount Hope literary magazine where she's served as an assistant editor and copyeditor since 2022. She is also a three-time participant in the RWU Bermont Fellowship in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction. She loves experimental storytelling, good theatre, and a passionate debate. Nicole was a summer 2024 intern for Thirty West.
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