(Ethel Zine & Micro Press, 46 pages, 2022, hand-sewn chapbook)

Far Cry, by Tom Daley, is a tribute to a friend passed and a searing elegy of a friendship lost. Daley writes in the Author’s Note that Far Cry is addressed to an estranged companion, Phil Herbert, who passed away unexpectedly in 2020. Though we don’t know how many years had passed since these two last connected or what exactly broke them apart, we get a sense that this relationship was close yet complicated, tender and torrid. Daley paints a real, imperfect portrait of his long-lost friend, as if carving him with two faces: one in ecstasy, and one in scorn. It is this tension between sweetness and sorriness that lifts Far Cry into the realm of complex elegy.

Written almost entirely in couplets, this collection snakes forward with a stoic rhythm and takes on a contemplative air of remembrance. Throughout the entire journey, Daley delivers his recollection of this now-gone friend so authentically that by the end of it, we feel as if we knew him, too. From the very opening of the book, we meet Phil’s “dear and dangerous mouth,” preparing us for the contradictions to come (12). Through these rife oppositional phrases, such as “marvelous yet querulous heart,” we come to see the many sides of friendship between these two gay men (10). 

There is both a deep admiration of and a pained aversion to the harshness of this friend. We come to know Phil as a lover of plants, a watcher of the weather, a fashionable gent, a radio personality, and a sexual being. We encounter his lively personality and alluring intrigue, his “mincing mischief / [his] sportive glee,” alongside his “mockery…browbeating…bulking / up with backbiting and disdain” (11, 27). Phil is no saint, and Daley does not attempt to sugarcoat his flaws or gloss over the “amphetamine of [his] smile” (12). Between them, sometimes, was raucous laughter and late nights at the bars, and sometimes, “envy and contempt” (21). This sharpness of description, perhaps, brings him to life more than if he were remembered only for his softness. There is a real humanness to the picture Daley paints.

Of course, there is an aura of sadness, longing, and missing in these pages, and we can feel the pain of having lost a friend without ever getting the chance to say goodbye, or even to reconcile. Is this book a wish for one final encounter, a desire for “the hot breath of goodbye” (20)? Daley tries to wrangle his friend back to him in these pages, “hungry for some trick / of time to redeem us / from our feuds” (17). A bittersweet reminiscence, Far Cry speaks to the yearning to connect with a loved one even after death, a thirst to somehow make sure they live on in our memories. Phil Herbert is memorialized in these pages as a complicated character, his “gone voice” now cruising over rooftops, echoing out into the air resonant with the difficult pang of love.

Nancy Lynée Woo is a poet, writer, organizer, and climate activist who harbors a wild love for the natural world. Her debut poetry collection is I’d Rather Be Lightning (GASHER Press, March 2023). Nancy has received fellowships from Artists at Work, PEN America, Arts Council for Long Beach, and Idyllwild Writers Week. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University.