Water, Tongues, Earth, and Blood by Charles Darnell

You only have to start this book to be transported to Louisiana. It is not the physical address or the swamps themselves, it is the landscape a skilled poet sees and describes. I publish 2 magazines of poetry and it was a joy when I first was introduced to Charles’ poetry. It still is. You will be as well when you read WATER, TONGUES, EARTH AND BLOOD. In the title poem Charles says “I was born here, my blood is drawn from the earth of this place” This phrase sets the book in motion. “You are left with the rising mist” he says in the poem Lake Martin, indeed the mist seems to drift from the page in this verbal landscape. The Bridge Tender comments about the ghosts that now occupy the bridge “The metal grate, Lazurus unrisen, no one watches, no one tends”. If you want to feel Louisiana read this book.

–Mike Gullickson publisher The Enigmatist and Blue Hole magazines, 2008 National Senior Poet Laureate.

In Charles Darnell’s Water, Tongues, Earth, and Blood, there is a grounded richness of memory’s place, filled with sugar cane, thickened air, kin, and wholly reconstructed times. When he writes, “my blood is drawn from the earth of this place,” we know it still flows in him forging poems whose taut craft plays a graceful counter to his “sluggish” homeland. And while the poems luxuriate in place, family, and incident, Darnell’s shaping hand and mind from far away in time and place are clear, “as if I died and moved to another plane, another life.”  I am grateful for these poems, the world they reveal with all Charles’ senses attuned, memory singing.
–Jim Lavilla-Havelin, author of Counting (Pecan Grove, 2010) and West (Wings, 2017) and Poetry Editor for The San Antonio Express-News