Read below my review of a book my friend Jesse D. Poole wrote and published recently titled “Beyond the Shadows of the Cane River.”
I too am fatherless.
The hole in my fatherless heart remained hole-y. And the hole in Jesse Poole’s heart remained hole-y.
I believe that Jesse found his fatherless life in the motherhood of Natchitoches, the oldest town sprawling under the shadows of the Cane River, tenuous. And maddening.
Thus began Jesse’s odyssey in search of his lost father, knowing that he would never find him in the land of living. Though it might appear quixotic to some readers, I regarded it a telling instance of the author’s courage and invincibility. And the quest continued.
The author’s odyssey was Homeric to some extent, but in reverse of the Homeric intent in the epic saga. The profane and peripatetic hero exerted Homeric effort at being transparent to a fault by punctuating his adventures with warts and all in his autobiography, Beyond the Shadows of the Cane River. I envisaged the author in the persona of Telemachus — unbound and unchained domestically.
Since he wasn’t out for revenge or retribution, the Louisianan Telemachus harbored no fear. “He was not afraid of anything, he was not fearing any man.” (MLK) Except the shape-shifting ghouls and goblins lurking in the shadows of the Cane River. Cowardly and treacherous. Illiberal and intolerant. He knew them all.
His was seeking the source of light.
I saw no need for me to reiterate Jesse the Telemachus’s episodic encounters with the sirens and Circe, and his exploits in the land held hostage by the oily Oligarchs, and being exploited by the progeny of the merchants of the shackled souls. The author had set it down in black and white.
Though running intermittently on fumes, he managed to remain free and unchained, but not unencumbered by the unmitigated loss of his father. Lashed by the cat-o’-nine-tails of what-ifs, Jesse sought redemptive revelation in the company of his toked-out friends on the sands of Florida Panhandle under the canopy of stars.
Revelations transpired in several forms.
The book also evoked a Joycean theme of the portrait of a photographer as a young man. The moment the author turned photographer began to chase lights I felt a warm glow in the hollow of my heart. Similarly, I surmised the author experiencing the warmth in his heart as well. For he wasn’t chasing any light, he was after the light that would wash over his brokenheartedness through the aperture of his suffering, filling the hole in his heart with light in place of longing.
He wasn’t seeking healing, he was seeking enlightenment.
During the course of his wandering, the author discovered a great deal about himself; he became the accidental bearer of lights lassoed by the lenses of his self-taught art of photography. The bringer of lights to disperse the shadows of the Cane River, he learned to navigate the world of chiaroscuro with the compass of his craft. His photographs illumined “Of what is past, or passing, or to come” (W. B. Yeats) in the Pelican State of Louisiana.
And yet the author’s life remained incomplete. Like Theseus, he needed Ariadne in flesh and form, in blood and bone of Corey Poole to tame the Minotaur of his mind. Unlike Theseus, he wasn’t after the mythical creature lurking in the labyrinth of Crete. Therefore, the question of the abandonment of the one he deeply loved in the City of Lights was mute. Besides, Corey offered him a lifeline of love to her heart, not the string to find his way out of the serpentine maze of the Cane.
At long last, Jesse found his home in Corey’s heart, the source of light.
