SAY, SAID by Fred Dale, reviewed by Andres Rojas • Cleaver Magazine

Poetry by Fred Dale, reviewed by Andres Rojas
SAY, SAID (Driftwood Press)

To the casual observer, the Mississippi River flows past New Orleans as peaceful and composed as a queen in her progress, yet its currents move surprisingly fast for such a wide river. Only when one experiences those currents first-hand can the river reveal its nature: the currents vary in speed and direction; they swirl and retrace their routes; they cut away and collapse the banks here, raise new banks there. Where the French Quarter stands today, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, sometime in March 1700, identified a spot to perch a city that the river could not wash away. Officially settled 18 years later, that city, New Orleans, is itself an eddy of forceful, converging currents: Native American, French, African, Spanish, Caribbean, American. It nurtured the blues and gave birth to, arguably, the one great American contribution to world culture—jazz. It became the abode of extravagant wealth built on slave labor, side by side with grinding poverty that nurtured prostitution, gambling, and every other sin of the flesh that can be bought.

This is the city in which Fred Dale was born and grew up. It is its culture and history, as they shaped his life even after leaving it, that he endeavors to trap in the poems of say, said like so many genies being put back into their lamps. He succeeds admirably.

The tension in the collection’s title is immense: the poems, as exquisitely crafted as fine crystal vessels on one side; the chaotic, overwhelming, untamable storm-surge of what the poems contain on the other. In “fishing poem,” Dale writes “we’re all contained by something, like grief’s deep drum, or tree resin that resolves to make amber of us.” And, sometimes, maybe inevitably, the containments burst, just as the banks of the river did long ago, just as the U.S. Corps of Engineers’ artificial ones did more recently:

as the levees released their boundless children and called her home, she popped back
through the uncapped grave like a killer whale, learned everlastingness was love giving up
on the rumor of the sea, and set sail across a land the chitimacha were wise not to settle on …
this flood has little to do with saints, agnes. the faithful ripped us apart for relics

[from “agnes in the flood”]

Here, Dale refers to the Chitimacha, one of the original settlers of the area, who were wise enough to move as the seasons required it, foregoing permanent claims to any piece of land, be it home or grave. As such, the Chitimacha never encountered New Orleans’ particularly challenging problem of handling the dead. With its high water table, burials in the city primarily take place above ground—not six feet deep but in stone vaults at the surface exposed to the whims of floods, hurricane winds, and whatever other catastrophes are included in the phrase “acts of God.” These mausoleums—fists raised against nature’s fury in, perhaps, futile gestures—are particularly important in this collection because they were Dale’s glimpses into an altogether unstable life and afterlife.

In the book’s first poem, “tonight’s the night,” we learn the poet’s mother only had boys; that she helped the speaker put on mascara for a Halloween costume, admiring his eyelashes; and that she mourned a miscarriage that might have been a daughter. Such is a Mardi Gras mask that covers and, of course, reveals by contrast, the trials of existence: “so much of the river we never know while we’re in it.” He might have written, “so much of life we never know while we’re in it.” The same could be said of each of our present moments, which are truly understood, maybe, only in retrospect. Perspective comes with hindsight, and Dale seems to suggest that sometimes that perspective will be bleak, as the poem closes: “darkness was our first home.”

However, in another of the complexities that Dale explores, hindsight also reveals the light. In “we are told bay leaves,” the poem that gives the collection its title, the speaker’s mother has the last word: “say, ‘said’ and I’ll remember a single word calls the past back to / the living.” While some have argued that words can make nothing happen, here Dale reminds us they can. What are humans but the one species on Earth we know of that has mastered language—not a set of limited communications, as dolphins and bees have, but the ability to describe what has not yet happened and to reconjure what would otherwise be lost?

The collection is arranged chronologically, beginning with the speaker as a young son and ending with him married and “a father to our good dog.” In this self-admittedly autobiographical collection, Dale’s Catholic upbringing in a city with deep Catholic roots (first French, then Spanish) colors the early poems. In “the boy who would be pope,” a nun proclaims, “ordination was not a prerequisite for the office, that pope was a job where / devotion to christ alone could win the day.” The unspoken contradiction here speaks volumes: while Canon Law does not require it, every pope for the past 648 years has been an ordained (male) priest and a member of the College of Cardinals. “Those days,” the poem continues, “i was vatican material, feared saints who suffered (more than me) / the guilt of their body breaking affairs.” It is no coincidence that the New Orleans professional football team is called the Saints, a team that, despite its divinely inspired name, has suffered a 20-year losing streak and won only one Super Bowl in its 60-year history. Any life, like any religion, like any country, like any city, like any sports team, can be reduced to the contrast between what could have been and what it turned out to be. But Dale wisely sidesteps this facile dichotomy: there are peaks and valleys in his work, and further peaks and valleys. Not just the dazzle of sunrises and sunsets, but the everyday blacks, whites, and grays are there as well.

Of course, saints do show up in the poems, hagiography as anti-biography: St. Agnes, St. Blaise, St. Edna (she of Whitby, but also a nod to Edna St. Vincent Millay). But where there are saints, there must be sinners. Among many, many other things, this collection is a guided tour of a young man’s excesses, where a church and a bar seem interchangeable, where each provides the same thing and yet something the other can’t: “the church pew says we’re in this together, but the barstool’s singularity / gets it right” [from “a barstool at st. nick’s”]. Notice what Dale does in these lines. A singularity is another name for a black hole, where physics as we understand it breaks down. And yet black holes exist despite what we can’t comprehend about them—infinity itself. Some may call this failure of comprehension “faith.” But singularities exist whether we believe in them or not.

Towards the end of the collection a quiet peace descends. Not the peace of willful ignorance, but the peace of acceptance. In “these trails never wanted us,” the poet and his father (whether in memory or in imagination) hike near Seward, Alaska. “dad says, we’re as helpless as water,” which must—against any will it may possess—run downslope, even a fraction of an inch’s worth. They see salmon struggling in the opposite direction, “vaulting against the pushback.” The salmon, “must sense, as we do, / the urgency of bears clawing down the mountain for a bite.” No saints or miracles here, just the biological imperative of living, spawning, and, yes, dying. The poet and his father wander trails that care nothing for them: the trials of life. The salmon, likewise, struggle against mostly hostile currents. To live is to endure: “dad says, a skull has / nothing to smile about. all things beautiful come with the risk of being ripped apart.” But there is beauty in a skull’s smile too, if one pays attention as Dale does: there is beauty in the salmon’s life and death struggle, just as there is beauty in the acceptance of our inevitable demise.

In the final poem, “waiting to speak,” Dale walks his deaf dog Earl (the only capitalized word in the collection). The dog is as deaf as the poet is childless. And yet, “he [Earl] listens up a blade of grass, cell by cell.” Dale’s wife tells him “there’s nothing she believes in [him] / so wholeheartedly as rain.” The landscape becomes an “eruption of flowers” that “holds tiny monks and a tailspin of matins,” summoned by the rain: a hidden illustrated manuscript revealed by the powers of imagination and language. One may not provide the seed, but rain plays a vital part too.

Fred Dale’s say, said is the work of a thoughtful, deep-feeling, and erudite voice worthy of being listened to. These poems are a down-river journey powered by currents that can’t be controlled, but they tell us that is ok. We can’t tame the river, but we can appreciate its magnificence and find our own magnificence in doing so. For river, read life.

say, said was released by Driftwood Press in January, 2026.

Andres Rojas is the author of two chapbooks and a full-length book, Third Winter in Our Second Country (Trio House Press). His poetry has appeared in, among others, AGNI, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, and Poetry Northwest.