Dean Díaz de León
Introduction by Catherine Abbey Hodges
Dean Díaz de León has spent decades creating in metal, wood, and landscape. Clean lines, textural juxtapositions, and elegant understatement are distinguishing features of his work. In recent years, Díaz de León’s artistic interests have opened out to include poetry, and it seems to me his experience with physical materials influences his poems and invests them with a kind of third dimension that rests inside the two dimensions of words on a page. I’m drawn to poems in which surface and depth share space, the metaphysical nestled just inside the physical—a version, perhaps, of William Carlos Williams’ “no ideas but in things.” Many of Tom Hennen’s and Jane Kenyon’s poems have this quality, and I find it as well in “A Beer with My Father in Guanajuato City” and “Light on a Coffee Pot.”
A Beer with My Father in Guanajuato City
So much color
parched
on valley walls
floating
above
our talk
the unsaid
of why
I am
the way I am
was part
your doing
and now
with the north
behind you
we look
at each other
reflecting
on what has
been and passed
between
as we both
look up
at the color
floating
above
our raised glasses.
Light on a Coffee Pot
Most mornings
he makes
a cup of coffee
for a while
he made
two cups
one was sweeter
and both
seemed to stay warm longer
this morning
he made only
one
before he went
outside to cut
some wood and his finger
and had to put on his own bandage.
Dean Díaz de León lives and builds in the foothills of California’s San Joaquin Valley. This is his first poetry publication.
Catherine Abbey Hodges is the author of four full-length collections, most recently Empty Me Full (Gunpowder Press, 2024). Her first book, Instead of Sadness, won the Barry Spacks Prize from Gunpowder Press. English Professor Emeritus at Porterville College and an advisory editor for Anacapa Review, Catherine writes, edits, teaches privately, and collaborates with musician Rob Hodges on ancestral Yokuts land.
Thank you for reading Volume 3, Number 1
