Patrick Friesen. Carrying the Shadow. Porcepic, 1999.
Reading Carrying the Shadow is like walking through a graveyard with Patrick and eavesdropping on the conversations he has. It is wonderful. I like it almost more than You Don't Get to Be a Saint. And I think I have found in it a poem that gave me goosebumps when I heard Patrick read it at a Word on the Street, about a dead man with an open blue eye--"the man who licked stones." But it is these lines, from "poem for a father" which make me want to quote and re-read:
I've watched him [a boy] on the beach
digging among the rocks
stopping to stare across the water
he doesn't know what he's looking for
it'a a code in his bones
that drives him toward memory (p. 64)
