By Jessica Colleen McDermott
Dave O’Leary’s collection of poetry and prose titled I Hear Your Music Playing Night And Day is a book that takes notice of the little things: empty beer cans left at a bus stop, a good burger on the way to a second job, inscriptions inside used books, or the quiet when a song stops playing on a bar jukebox. The poems inside speak from a place of solitude and personal reflection, while also calling attention to the everyday experiences and people that pass through a person’s life and often go unnoticed.
O’Leary’s poems read with sincerity, and they remind us to take note of others and the small and big happenings that create a life. One example of this in the poem “Gray Days” in which O’Leary explores the monotony of working long hours while also revealing his attention to his surroundings and in doing so, his humanity. One section reads, “The days / were stringing /together night / into day / day into / night / and back / again and some / of those hours / were spent / working / and some / writing / and some / just lost / to whatever / and whole / months / of sameness / would go by.”
These “whole months of sameness” are familiar to any working person, but they don’t isolate him from the rest of the world. After such long, gray days, the speaker of the poem still takes note of a seemingly homeless man who like him, can’t tell the time of day. Once the speaker tells the man it is 5:27 p.m., not a.m., the following lines complete the narrative, “After a moment / I approached / him and left / my six / pack next to / his empties / hoping it, / they, / would help / him sort / it out…” These seemingly small moments of human connection carry the collection.
Along with other poems in the collection, the final poem titled “Again” encapsulates much of the book’s balance of the personal and exterior world. In “Again,” the speaker has again started reading a book at a bar. The humor, to an extent, and the relatability comes from the speaker’s attempt to not pay any mind to the news, his cellphone, and the people existing around him, while it is clear that in a way he can’t remove himself because he is a part of it all. Toward the end of the poem, the speaker says, “so I’ve begun doing it / again / and if you see me doing it / don’t say hello / don’t even buy me / a drink / maintain your / space / sip your own / drink / and then later / we’ll talk / we’ll catch / the killers / lock up the ex-president / and maybe / just maybe / jump for joy…”
The joy and further detailed imagined cheer at the end of the poem is a shared joy, the significance of which is not lost on the reader. Throughout the book we witness the resiliency and connection of everyday people despite the “odds,” as O’Leary puts it, being stacked against them. And it is the book’s witness to the everyday and the joy found therein that makes this text both profoundly timely and lasting.
I Hear Your Music Playing Night and Day can by purchased on Amazon by following the link on the Cajun Mutt Press website.