Mending Holes

Patrick Dixon conjures his past life as an Alaskan fisherman with his considerable poetic and storytelling gifts and a capacious memory for the perfect detail. That world's thrills, exhaustion, danger, jonesing, friendships, boats, whiff of diesel layered over fish, and orange pink sunsets all feel close enough to touch. So does the push and pull of yearning, fear, and wonder that remain. This is a beautiful account of an old life lived completely in the crystalline present, and the cost and reward of giving it up in time. -Kathleen Flenniken, former Washington state Poet Laureate and author of Plume and Post Romantic Patrick Dixon, with decades of commercial salmon fishing behind him, has convincingly captured the reality of his time and place-the smells of fish, the light at the end of a day, wooden boats moldering on the beach, nets full of fish and empty nets holding the next year's hopes, the greenhorn he was, the old man of memories. He asks, late in this alternately heart-stopping and heart-warming collection, "How did I get to be so lucky?" We are all lucky that Patrick has given us such an intimate, honest, literate look into his examined life. -Nancy Lord, author of Fishcamp and Beluga Days