Darkness on the Face of the Deep

For this stunning collection, Patrick T. Reardon has chosen as title a line out of Genesis, as reworked by Bob Dylan. That mesh makes sense: in an incantatory voice all his own, Reardon manages to mix the local and the oracular at every turn of phrase. The poems teem with road names, ordinary and overtoned: Randolph Street, Clark Street, Proverb Street, Ecclesiastes Road. What happens on and by those roads can feel, in Reardon’s capacious geography, like everything that has ever mattered in human history (“Bull Run, Fort Dearborn, Agincourt”) and in literature too (“all sagas and Iliads, all Great White Whales”). Like many of our most astonishing poets, from Homer to Ginsberg, Reardon knows how to make the sacred gritty and the gritty sacred.

—Stuart Sherman, author of the history Telling Time and English professor, Fordham University

A veteran reporter, Patrick T. Reardon combines an analytical eye with a poet’s heart creating verse layered with intrigue and surrender. Darkness on the Face of the Deep weaves together the spiritual, abstract, and fully present. His vibrant poems blend biblical imagery with modern angst. His inquisitive characters, comic and tragic, find paths in landscapes of sorrow, joy, and fear. Readers will take wild rides on juxtaposed associations, as in “African lion,” dedicated to Chicago poet Haki Madhubuti: “Flame conflagrates still / those who have ears / to hear, raw hearts, / — steel spine, / mother touch — / as when / he first taught: Don’t cry / scream.”

—John Raffetto, author of the poetry collection Human Botany

In Darkness on the Face of the Deep, Patrick T. Reardon has created an Old Testament set in his beloved hometown of Chicago — a beat he knows well. In this remarkable collection, Reardon travels the city’s streets and alleyways reporting on a heavenly host of only-in-Chicago characters. Like a modern-day Jeremiah, Reardon offers his personal Book of Lamentations, while providing universal insights into love, loss, and life. Reardon joins other Catholic mystic authors, such as Flannery O’Connor and Jack Kerouac, in exploring the eternal mysteries while facing both the light and the darkness.

—Melanie Villines, author of the novel Windy City Sinners and editor / publisher at Silver Birch Press