First Chairs

“Celebration?!” wrote a friend, incredulous after reading my intro to last week’s Red Letter.  “Have you been paying attention—these days, what’s to celebrate?”  I think he misunderstood me, perhaps imagining something on the order of fireworks, birthday sparklers.  But a poet like Con Squires provides the ideal response, again and again throughout his poetry: memory, dogs, New Orleans jazz, a friend’s voice, Atlantic waters lapping below his home, second chances—and, oh yes, the sight of a child—any child—for whom nearly every minute of each ordinary day is charged with awe, surprise, fear, relief, unanticipated pleasure. Deep attention—a poet’s stock in trade — equals, in my mind, celebration.

Case in point: following a divorce, and at a time when his life felt in disarray, Con met his future wife—the partner with whom he still shares his days (and, even better, Bonnie Bishop is a fine poet as well).  Later, being introduced to his bride’s brother and sister-in-law, he remembers the couple seated on their couch, each with one of their twin babies held in the crook of an arm, a symmetrical tableau, feeding them from bottles.  Con goes home and puts pencil to paper: celebration.  I find such simple beauties throughout this poet’s work, in collections like Dancing with the Switchman and Ifka’s Castle, not to mention his novel about ancient China—The First Emperor—and a section in the anthology The Heart Off Guard from Every Other Thursday Press.  Years pass; the babies grow; the poem remains evergreen.  The biographical note he sent me ended with this sentence: “Con Squires is 89 and getting younger by the minute.”  Quod erat demonstrandum.