My favorite thing about Tony Trigilio’s The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood) is, honestly, probably the title.
And considering how much I absolutely loved this first installment of the multi-part project, that’s saying a hell of a lot.
On the surface, it couldn’t be a simpler and more accurate description of the poem’s content and scope—it’s a comprehensive overview, in verse, of every episode of the old soap opera Dark Shadows, which Trigilio watched with his mother, yes, while he was a child. But, by the time I finished reading Book 1, I found the phrase starting to run through my head at odd moments, like a scrap of melody—especially that catchy, parenthetical bum-bump “of my childhood” at the end. Beyond the pleasant rhythm of it, though, I found myself turning it over in my mind repeatedly as I began to more fully appreciate and take in its poignancy.
More than just the retold plot lines of an old TV show, the real dark shadows of this book are the excavated memories of childhood nightmares, family tensions, adult regrets and reckonings. As his memories of the episodes merge with his current reassessment of the show while he rewatches, in present time, the DVD box (coffin) set, these cheesy characters open all manner of vistas for him onto the places where ghosts of the past are finally ready to be dealt with. Just as the show itself jumps from the late 1960s back to 1795 and he must find a way to keep the narrative straight for us as readers, he likewise jumps from 2012 to 1967 (with various stops in between) to find the threads that keep it all straight inside himself, emotionally and spiritually.
Coincidence, arriving
at the 10/2/67 episode on 10/2/12,as if reading about aliens traveling
hundreds of light years wasn’t enoughto imagine time is circular rather than linear,
that all moments in time exist at the same time
As I begin to embark on my own reassessment of the childhood incidents and influences that continue to affect me in adulthood, I was so deeply touched by, and grateful to, Tony’s willingness to divulge private moments with such fearlessness and clarity. (Full disclosure: Tony and I play in the same band!) Learning to strum Johnny Cash chords on guitar with his father, sitting with his dying cat not long after his divorce, and, perhaps most movingly, telling how his mother watched her deaf-mute brother finally speak in the hospital in the last moments before his death—these are the images that will haunt not my nightmares but my dreams for how truthful and resonant I too aspire to be on the page.
Queen of Peaches 