Between Gone and Everlasting
Danita Dodson writes with emotive transparency about loss, the passing of generations, and the love of a father whose memory becomes a source of light after his death. Between Gone and Everlasting pans the perimeters of mourning with a phenomenal scope: heartrending reflections on grief, tender odes of remembrance, stunning elegies about Appalachia’s fading past, and stirring psalms of spiritual awakening amid loss. Gracefully illustrating how the griever inhabits the umbral space between lamenting the gone and celebrating the everlasting, Dodson examines a central paradox: the irrevocable absence of the departed illuminates that which remains. In these poems, the past echoes inside the present with song-like rhythms, intricately threaded together with a warmth reminiscent of the quilts she describes. As the speaker commemorates her father’s presence in rural East Tennessee, she gathers images rooted in her sense of place and reverence of nature, revealing that the hills hold space for honoring loss, for remembering, and for seeing “light in the mourning.” In energic words that summon healing and tap into the universal human experience, Dodson makes the personal space a communal one, where grief becomes a sacred, creative act connecting the bereaved to the departed within poetry’s “thin place.”
Forthcoming in Spring 2024 with Wipf and Stock Publishers
Praise for Between Gone and Everlasting
“In Between Gone and Everlasting, Danita Dodson crafts love songs to counter mourning, to remember and travel old roads, and to recollect mementos both tangible and heartfelt. Quilts fluttering on a line beckon the reader to stand in the present and revisit a world and loved ones, now dead, to worship in cathedrals of green, draw strength from the earth, and perhaps receive a trailside baptism.” —JANE HICKS, author of The Safety of Small Things
“Danita Dodson’s poems in Between Gone and Everlasting touch lovingly on the painful but essential aspects of loss, and they transcend elegantly to the healing strength that emerges from reconciling such losses as natural consequences of living. In this beautifully written book, the reader, like the poet, can revel in nature and step ‘light to the water’s edge’ and ‘go in, go under, come up, / a creature restored and made whole.’” —ARTHUR J. STEWART, author of The Hallelujah Series and Other Poems
“Danita Dodson’s Between Gone and Everlasting is a love song to a past never truly out of reach. The opening poems reveal the speaker’s deep grief over the sudden loss of her father but also trace her journey to understanding how memories become ‘light in a dark room’ and how ‘love outflies the edge of life and death.’ Ultimately, the scope of Dodson’s collection widens to admiration for all her forebears as well as agrarian life too quickly vanishing. These poems are a sensitive reminder that those who have gone before are ‘asking that we keep their echoes with us.’” —PEGGY HAMMOND, author of The Fifth House Tilts
“In Between Gone and Everlasting, Danita Dodson’s voice captures the magic of the ordinary, where ‘the real miracle was that I noticed.’ These poems celebrate a lifetime of experiences imbued with humor, sorrow, and love that come from insight learned (sometimes too late). Offering a poignant reminder of both the joys and insecurities of growing up and growing old, the poet recognizes loss in all its forms as she honors the truth of ‘leaving a signature of what you’ve lived, / just like trees and rocks leave marks.’ This well-crafted collection is one the reader will reach for again and again.” —KB BALLENTINE, author of Spirit of Wild