Final Inventory contains the deeply personal poetry by the author, David Anthony Sam, written as his mother was dying and in the years after. Here, Sam celebrates his mother’s life and her impact on him, grapples with her dying and his helplessness to ease her from this life, and mourns her by “mothering himself a new life” absent her powerful presence. Words are a gift his mother gave him, given that she loved to read and was an author herself albeit with few publications. So it is appropriate that Sam use those words to honor her as well as convey the journey that (while individual here to the two of them) is nonetheless a universal one.
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Time after time these varied brilliant caresses of the domestic heart bloom like flowers in the same basket. What a performance!
-Robert P. Arthur, author of Hymn to the Chesapeake and President of the Poetry Society of Virginia.
In Final Inventory, David Sam demonstrates again his profound gift for finding that which is permanent in change, and that which is sacred in loss. Sam’s poetry reminds us that “the deep encumbering earth” of our shared experience is the music we all move to; his poetry reminds us to listen to the forgotten notes of our own anthems.
-Todd Neuman, Professor of English, Pensacola State College, former editor of The Hurricane Review and The Kilgore Review.
Chapbooks in their compactness are a perfect vehicle for condensed attention, as in these touchingly written poems of a mother’s death and a son’s cherished remembrances of her life and their lives together. Metaphors of floral and vegetative growth underwrite loss amid swirling complex emotions that are well expressed in the memorable phrase “the vertigo of mortality.” However, it is the plaintive, breathless urgency of the title poem, Final Inventory, that speaks most powerfully with its repeated “wait,” “wait,” as an revisiting of familiarities and things left unfinished hopes to postpone the end. In its wake, the author resolves, “I must mother myself a new life,” With this book, emotionally and poetically, its happening.
- Allan Peterson, author of Fragile Acts and Other Than They Seem
