The Color of Mesabi Bones: Poems and Prose Poems

Book by Caddy, John

The opening poems here introduce the "Giant," the "child" and the "boy"--recurrent figures that transform a commonplace father and son into fairy-tale characters. Caddy ( Eating the Sting ) proffers vivid memories of growing up during WW II, when cereal boxes printed "targets" of Hitler and Tojo, and children salvaged and saved to aid the war effort. Later, accounts of horrendously beaten women, children and animals are tempered with love, as in the accomplished "The Conspirators," where two brothers unite for the first time in fantasizing revenge against their abusive father. Most pieces are presented from a boy's point of view, with pathos as well as self-knowledge: "All women are the mother / who is a wet wound / he can never close. . . . / He must not heal himself with them." Fluid and accessible, Caddy's poems carefully detail the milieu of several generations of Minnesota miners, men who yearn for sport and assume that "boys are fair game." Illustrated.
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