My father loved to fish. When I was little and he had time away from his job at the steel mill, he hustled my two sisters and me into the car and drove us to his favorite river hideaway for afternoons of fishing. Although I never cast a line, I still cherish those quiet, peaceful days with Dad.

Nostalgia certainly plays a role in the connection that I feel for Richard Jordan’s exquisite chapbook The Squannacook at Dawn, in which a shared love of fishing and nature bond a father and son. But beyond the pull of memory, I am drawn to Jordan’s ability to transport me to the banks of the 16-mile-long Squannacook River—located in northern Massachusetts—with poems that take all the time that is needed to observe trout and largemouth bass, osprey and mallards, muskrat and otters, dragonflies and damselflies. From his first poem—“Casting from Shore”—to the last—“Casting from Shore (II)”—I stand with him (and, often, his father) in deep appreciation of our natural world and the inexorable passing of time. This is a book of learning and love and letting go. It is a book that acknowledges and honors rituals. It is a book that gives back.

After multiple readings of this collection, I eventually came to the idea that the third poem—“Jesus on the River”—could be read in two vastly different ways.

Sometimes he thinks he should enter the church, but the river
holds him, with kingfishers that rattle back and forth across a
quiet pool, slate-blue wingtips almost dipping in, more graceful
than clergy. From a boulder in the middle of the pool, he can see
parishioners go through the doors. They are small from up there,
like dolls. Meanwhile, he admires the way a trout faces the current
to breathe and consume what’s delivered by the flow—that would
make a good sermon, he imagines. It’s the one he would give.

At first, I felt the poet’s fleeting shred of conscience for choosing fishing over church. It is a push-and-pull of “shoulds” that capitulates to the irresistible magnetism of the river. Although that is an adequate (albeit brief) interpretation, it was the voice of Jesus that found its way into my next several readings. Was it Jesus who answered the river’s call? Jesus, who preferred to be immersed in nature? Jesus, who imagined a sermon that offers deliverance? Jesus, the fisher of men?

Why not? Why not imagine that Jesus, too, responds to the call of the Squannacook and everything that lives in and around it? This is what the poet has done. It is what his father did.

Having loosened my thinking with this one poem, I felt freer to inhabit these poems with greater abandon. “Mackerel Day” became even more expansive than a species of fish; it captured times in the past when the familiar lighthouse “far/off on the island disappeared and fog swirled thick and low over/the breakwater.” The boy—now a man—wanted it back. All of it. The “slick/rocks threading silver treble hooks with clams.” The seagulls “circling/closer and closer.” The “moan of/a ship out there somewhere.” His father. He wants his father and those carefree days they spent together. Days when the most important things were listening and observing the natural world. He wants his father who is the touchstone for the mystery of life that held such promise when he was young.

But some things can never return. They can only be remembered and passed along to others, as Jordan does in his poem “Ice-Out,” in which he observes two young boys riding their bicycles and “waving fishing poles,/splashing through fresh puddles from March melt.” Jordan has traveled a far distance from his own boyhood, and his experience tells him that fish will not be tempted to bite “in such frigid water.” But he celebrates these boys and their exuberance for emulating that same mystery he once inherited from his own father, expecting that, eventually, they will come to “understand patience/and these ancient patterns” yet praying that “it’s no time soon.”

The Squannacook at Dawn was the first place winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize in 2023. In her reflection on choosing this manuscript, contest judge and poet Andrea Hollander (author of And Now, Nowhere but Here, ‎Terrapin Books) notes that the “poems provide readers with a tightly woven and beautiful verbal tapestry.” I will take her high praise one step further by saying that—with just 20 poems—Richard Jordan guides the reader to an unforgettable place where daily concerns are replaced by the healing power of nature. Jordan, who makes his home a “short drive from the Squannacook River,” is a Ph.D. mathematician by training and data scientist by vocation. Although this is his first published collection, his poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Rattle, New York Quarterly, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. He is an Associate Editor for Thimble Literary Magazine. Hear him read from The Squannacook at Dawn at The Poetry Box LIVE (February 2024; 34:40).

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