Peggy Hammond

Between Gone and Everlasting

Arts & Literature

“Danita Dodson’s Between Gone and Everlasting is a love song to a past never truly out of reach. The opening poems reveal the speaker’s deep grief over the sudden loss of her father but also trace her journey to understanding how memories become ‘light in a dark room’ and how ‘love outflies the edges of life and death.’ Ultimately, the scope of Dodson’s collection widens to admiration for all her forebears as well as agrarian life too quickly vanishing. These poems are a sensitive reminder that those who have gone before are ‘asking that we keep their echoes with us.’”