THE BOOK: The only thing that makes sense is to grow.
PUBLISHED IN: January 2020
THE AUTHOR: Scott Ferry
THE EDITOR: Eric Morago
THE PUBLISHER: Moon Tide Press
SUMMARY: The Only Thing That Makes Sense Is to Grow traces the lineage of a family through the voices of its ghosts. This collection takes the grief and residue of generations, places it in moist soil, and lets it root and spread into unlikely openings of enlightenment and humor. Yet, far from being opaque, these poems remain accessible and edible as the cherry tomatoes that somehow survived this dry and bitter stretch. Life and death, decay and regeneration, childhood and blind adulthood, and language and its innate power to heal are all themes that weave through these narrative poems with a refreshing candor.
THE BACK STORY: I could have titled this collection 42 Poems about Ghosts, Grief, and Gardening, but it was shot down by my wife (for good reason). These poems came out of a fertile period of writing in which I examined my roots through my father and even my great great grandparents to illuminate my immediate family life and dynamics. Many of the characters who have passed are very much alive literally and figuratively either as ghosts or in our words and bodies. Gardening becomes a metaphor for many things: renewal from death, weeding the anxieties, expectations not growing to reality. Throughout, the way I parent my daughter shines through the way I was parented, for better or for worse. There is a reckoning of mistakes and a hope for change. This was therapeutic to write as it walked me through the stages of grief. Ultimately, I will hopefully take the reader with me back into an early summer light and the promise of a new birth.
AUTHOR PROFILE: Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. He has 2 books of poetry: The only thing that makes sense is to grow (Moon Tide, 2020) and Mr. Rogers kills fruit flies (Main St. Rag, 2020). His third book, These Hands of Myrrh, will be published by Kelsay Books in late 2021. More of his work can be found @ ferrypoetry.com.
REVIEWS
“In his short collection The only thing that makes sense is to grow Scott Ferry fashions a world where the ability to speak with the spirits of the loved dead may be inherited, where these voices “remind [us] that clocks and flesh do not/represent reality” (“Another Time, Another Wand”). Life and death, the personal past, and the farrago of dreams, freighted with fantasy, are woven into the fabric of these imagistic poems in which trauma may be healed, and fear of the future smoothed away. Ferry aspires to be a healer, nurturing the “infestations we want” (“Weeds, suffering”), but learns that “growth cooperates/very little when it is forced” (“Dice, marigolds, molecules”), accepting at the last that he has “overestimated [his] power to kill, to control anything” (“It is April Again”). —Robbi Nester
“This isn’t a book of obscure or esoteric poetry; it touches on things we hold in common. These poems read like double-exposures, and you’ll see yourself in the truths touched upon in this book. I feel a kindred spirit in the way Scott Ferry talks about family. An examined life is like walking in a house of mirrors; you see your parents in the way you parent, see your childhood in your own child and, of course, your ancestors will speak to you if you begin to listen.” — Daniel McGinn.
“Scott Ferry has a tender heart. These remarkable poems celebrate family in all its messy glory, elevating the quotidian into art.” — Alexis Rhone Fancher
SAMPLE
My mother calls me
to tell me her mother died.
We visited Grandmother Downes
in the hospital yesterday.
I made a joke about the aqua fluid
flowing into her arm as she slowly
fell away. What is that stuff,
blue food? And she laughed.
I didn’t want her to see me in despair.
I thought that would make it worse
for her.
My mother told me later
that when she and her sister were
in the room and their mother
suddenly became lucid,
even cheerful, they asked her
Is papa here? She nodded
emphatically and the television
in the room turned on by itself,
blaring noise and color.
Papa had passed many years before.
They asked the nurse why
the television turned on and she didn’t
have an answer, and swept out of
the room as quickly as she could.
After my mother called, the phone
rang again. I assumed it was another
one of my relatives telling me
of her death. I said I know, I’m ok
before anyone could speak.
Then I listened for a response,
and waited. Nothing but faint
breathing, errant static.
I held the phone for about
a minute, still nothing.
I hung up. I never
knew who it was.
The way my father ate chicken (Originally appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly)
revealed the source of his hunger.
He assimilated each leg quickly and thoroughly,
lapping every sinew and hanging thread of its juice.
He glanced at my bones when I set them down
and shook his head. You missed a lot of meat.
He was born in 1932, in the middle of the starving.
His father died at age 26 from heart damage
from the Spanish Flu and Strep.
His mother remarried a selfish man who spent
little attention on Lyle, more on a bottle.
His stepfather Gary would refer to him as the boy
to his wife while Lyle sat right next to him at the table,
as in Can you tell the boy to mow the lawn?
Lyle decided to become more than a third person,
winning student body president at both
Excelsior High and Long Beach State.
He cruised his Austin-Healey with charm,
joined the elite fraternity, visited the UCLA
chapter and stole all their women (he bragged).
He became an English teacher in his old neighborhood
while most of his friends became multi-millionaires.
We still skied with the Haleys in Mammoth,
visited the Malloys on San Juan Island,
but there was always a vacuum in his mouth,
lack in his words. He began to bald, so he spent
nearly an hour each morning spraying
aerosol maple on his scalp and fashioning
his side hair over his crown. I can still taste
the PVP in the air by the three-way mirror.
His glib and perfuse words failed to direct his family,
because we had swallowed them too many times.
He turned to shouting. We knew he was still
the president, he didn’t need to remind us every day,
with 10,000 words. Of course, we stopped
listening. And in the barking, I heard
the brittle hunger of a boy, two thin bones
on his plate.
Sunset through the wires (Originally appeared in Cultural Weekly)
I have taken pictures of the sanguine
descent of the sun behind Mt. Jupiter and Mt. Constance
from my back deck in blue-collar Renton. Not only
do the Olympics shrink and the novels of blood-cloud
thin to excerpts, but seven electrical wires bisect the frame.
When I am standing there at 9:30 with my wife,
the dew falling out the air with faint winds,
bare soles on the cooling wood, we can
imagine it without impediments, without
the five trucks on the lawn across the street,
without the tin glow of Benson Center.
We can imagine away many things.
We live in continual imagining,
either that horrors do not exist
because they do not cut us,
or that we are so lucky to actually
own a home we spend 5/7ths of our lives
working to afford. But more conveniently,
we can be content with the canvas before us
by editing it on the way from the optic chiasma
to the visual cortex to the cerebrum to the reward
and satiety centers. We choose, ignore, wash, reflect
any number of actual details. We have different
methods of dealing with discontent. I vow
to fix and clean and dispose and finish.
My wife plans whole new houses in France,
designs campervans with solar powered escape buttons.
But there are still black scars, children starving,
corporations and memes selling our peace
back to ourselves with interest, the peace
we were born with and have always had,
in and through our light. And if my wife
stands close enough I can feel her and can
frame it all: bile, arsenic, lies, compassion,
forgiveness, grace. And I can still breathe
in her neck and shudder and hold
and breathe again.
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 