Yelping the Tegmine by Cal Freeman

The paragraphing of verse in English turns on the cusp of Lyrical Ballads, not from the familiar to the strange, but the opposite, from the weirdness of heightened speech to the conversational pitch of emotion which, upon reading it, we seem to have always known. Cal Freeman’s poetry scaffolds a similar structure through which his lyric moments flash. He cannot disguise that he is a Detroit poet, and unlike Levine, who abandoned (except in poetry) the once smoking landscape of Southeast Michigan, this increasingly accomplished poet has engaged a life there that is complex and erudite. His is a first-rate talent. Loss is his common topic, and there is a deep philosophical openness to the work of grief. Showing uncanny patience for the thought of longish poems, Freeman holds onto what unfolds for him and then what is revealed for us; as with all good poets, we do not know what he is after at first, but in such wonderfully titled poems as “Dichotomy Paradox as a Non-Fungible Token,” “Yelping the Tegmine” (the title poem), and “Adrian Dantley (AD) Circa 1890s,” we ourselves might say, as we arrive at our understanding, that it’s “the first time [we] remember feeling this way.”

–Kevin Cantwell, author of One Thousand Sheets of Rice Paper

“Nothing really ends, you think, looking out across the lake and knowing otherwise.” This is a book full of haunting poems. Barrooms, Inns, cafes, restaurants, rivers, lakes, memories of places and hard working people living or lost, what’s said and unsaid, the poet alone, reading a book of poetry sipping a whiskey at a bar also shadowed by its past, and always the “returning to something: song, place, or figment.” Cal Freeman’s masterful craft, attention to word, phrase, and detail leave us in awe of his talent. “…the walleyes have minted my irises/ on a bed of sediment and turned them into silver” he says, and we are hooked on his “… certain kind of singing.” Ideas shift mercurially from micro to macro, leap from the quotidian to the philosophical immersing us in real worlds woven with loss yet so alive and vibrant that his poems become the ultimate tribute, an act of preservation and resurrection, and all the while the constellation Tegmine continues to shine over us all.

–Zilka Joseph, author of In Our Beautiful Bones, Sparrows and Dust, and Sharp Blue Search of Flame