Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022
Review: Tornado Drill by Dave Malone
Reviewed by Barry Harris
Title: Tornado Drill Author: Dave Malone Year: 2022 Publisher: Kelsay Books
From my first read of the title poem, Dave Malone’s poetry reveals itself in its crafted word choice and artful metaphor. Before the tornado, the school children in “Tornado Drill” are not simply hiding beneath their desks. Their “…legs angle / and lean like autumn crickets.” Time slows within the poem illustrated by dust motes which float, not just around their shoes, but “above the tongues of our sneakers.” When the storm hits, “… the sky paints / the classroom windows cocoa.” Not muddy brown, but cocoa. While I have, over time, read and published three of the poems in this volume, this was my first time reading a collection of Malone’s work in one sitting. By the time I reached the end of the opening title poem, I was enchanted by his deft use of metaphor when his final couplet is a refer back to the opening image of the angular legs of schoolchildren cramped under their desks “like autumn crickets:” Some of us srape wings together and squeak Others weep. I scramble to the glass.
A reader discovers in Malone’s poetry his ability to meld two stories into one, or perhaps reveal that they are both one. In “Leaf Blower,” the poet’s morning neditation is interrupted by a leaf-blowing neighbor. Like mathematics, … She’s precise the way she slides from side to side, the way she forms right angles as if acing high school math.
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