FDS Insight Newsletter Oct-Dec 2020

55 First Name Surname Date of Birth Date of Death Age Erika Von Cerva 07/04/1957 18/11/1987 30 Melissa Vreeken 09/12/1970 25/12/2001 31 Darryl Webster 14/10/1971 06/11/2000 29 James Bernard Williams 16/05/1961 11/11/1991 30 Daniel Wren 22/03/1982 17/11/2008 26 Adrian 11/08/1979 09/10/2016 37 Don’s Review COVER MY DREAMS IN INK The story of Jessie and Paul Dunleavy, written by Jessie Published 2020, Apprentice House Press, Maryland US My first reaction was with the thought ‘Nick Drake’. Those who know my reference will also suspect that things didn’t go very well for Paul Dunleavy. But the clue is also in the name Nick Drake: so young, so beautiful, so much to offer, and not much time allowed. The poetry contained in this new book is gutwrenchingly, gloriously human. It is the music of the Romantics, the stark reality of the Cohens and the Dylans, but it is also the tender total comforting embrace of a Mozart vesper ( Laudate Dominum , perhaps) or a weeping violin from the Benedictus in Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis . A big call, true, but it seems, at least to this near-octogenarian, that all this potential exists in the lines we are offered, in what is in effect a collected glossary at the conclusion of Jessie’s essentially sad biographical narrative. I feel that much of what I might say here is inadequate. And I can read ‘struggle’ in the publisher’s selected quotes from other reviewers. I know these struggles well, and how the publisher cherrypicks the ones most likely to affect the casual reader and grab attention. The struggle in Jessie and in Paul is evident in the reviewers’ struggles to suggest something adequate. ‘Vital’, ‘Riveting reminder’, ‘Vital account’, ‘Poignant’… all true but none even moderately adequate, as of course no such truncated assessment ever can be. I have no intention of destroying the impact on you, the reader, by trying feebly to offer a selection of platitudes. Rather, and quite rarely for me, I’d just like to offer you three extracts from Paul’s work. To be frank, if they don’t have you desperate to read his other poetry and Jessie’s tragic account of the overall thirty-four years journey, I’ll be very surprised. And of course since that’s probably the real job of the reviewer of such a fine work, I’ll have done my bit.