Midwest Book Review

Two Dogs and a Cigar

Tom Snyder

Lone Willow Press

P.O. Box 31647, Omaha NE 68131

no ISBN $7.95 chapbook at 39 pages

It's always a pleasure to discover a chapbook from Lone Willow Press in the mailbox. Their featured poets are diverse in style and voice, but all singularly accomplished in their own way. Tom Snyder's poetry has appeared in many literary journals, and he edited the Duckabush Journal for several years. Snyder writes with wit and insight, and occasionally a moving intensity I felt inadequate to demonstrate in review.

His skillful use of metaphor was clearly demonstrated in the first poem, as in this stanza from "O Bird":

whose throat bleeds

music, who draws religion

from a stone and sings

like water flowing....

Even the mundane subject of an unmowed lawn becomes special in Snyder's hands, as in this excerpt from "Poem in Need of Eighty Acres":

Meanwhile, their grass declares victory.

Dandelions flower and cloud, big as seagulls.

My initial response after reading "Death of the Elwha" was stunned silence. In this poem, Snyder names those responsible for killing off giant salmon due to greed and stupidity. Rivers rich with salmon since time began were dammed without fish ladders. Snyder's poetic treatment of the aftermath is powerful:

Dams built in defiance of the law.

So the legislature changed the law to allow hatcheries,

rag factories, and accepted more dams

without fishways --

killers of the wild runs

on the Cowlitz, Chehalis, and White Salmon.

Mother of all, the Columbia, choked by dams and silt!

It is done, I have named them...a story

instead of a song. A long rope of

words and ghosts

to hang them.

Snyder works wonders with the commonplace. In "A Better Day", he breathes new life into a quiet day:

Red wine, almost chewy, softens

the afternoon to a pleasant deformity.

And the simple truths of nature become his focus in "Snoqualmie Song":

Little streams

of light

fall to their senses

and become the forked fingers of time.

The world rolls like a heavy stone

from the cave of your heart.

Whether memorializing nature, governmental deceits, or inhumanities perpetrated by the rich and powerful, Snyder manipulates words in delightful ways. The thirty poems in this chapbook are prime examples of his craft.

Laurel Johnson

March/2005