House of Sound - by Matthew Daddona (Paperback)

About the Book

House of Sound is a dynamic and dexterous debut from a bold new writer, a commentary upon the joys and defeats of trying to live most beautifully.

Book Synopsis

"'It takes a lot to say I love you, I mean it / and mean it, ' says the speaker in Matthew Daddona's rich and impactful debut, House of Sound. These poems articulate not just love as an act, but also absence, longing, and philosophies, all as a measure of life and its relevance. To stay or to go? This is the central question that haunts the speaker. And when one goes, is one ever really gone? These poems ring with questions: 'I want their wings. I want their answer.' In sound, memory, and the lack thereof. In life, love-and the lack thereof. This collection is an exciting example of language as meditation, mediation, and conciliation, as well as action. To write, to love, to understand, to contemplate-these are all verbs that require action and attention. Attend to the quiet yearning in these poems. 'Because a shadow / wants to leave you / but doesn't know how, ' attend to the way these beautiful poems move through the body as heartsong, as a form of human touch."

-Chelsea Dingman, author of Through a Small Ghost and Thaw

Academy of American Poets prize-winning poet Matthew Daddona's debut collection, House of Sound, is a rumination on domesticity and modern-living, a playful and earnest attempt to discover truth within silence and hope within noise.

In these twenty-eight poems, Daddona combines narrative and lyricism to recreate a home-and thus, a mode of living-that delivers to us a family searching for contact amid society's cacophony. In "Poem for Leaving," a narrator attempts to put together a former friend's reason for deserting him for a more alluring country, while in "Tourist Trap," a husband reckons with trying to protect his wife from verbal and physical assault while pondering the language of violence and appeasement. As the roles of mother, father, sister, brother, daughter, son, are often exchanged, borrowed, interplayed, the collection externalizes their choices by showing the narrator take flight from his hometown in the conclusive "Poem for Returning." Celebrating language, and ultimately the liberty of choice, Daddona writes, "To become love, / dress in idiom."

House of Sound is a dynamic and dexterous debut from a bold new writer, a commentary upon the joys and defeats of trying to live most beautifully.

Review Quotes

"I can't remember where I heard it but I heard someone say, when referring to the music of Miles Davis, that he played the 'sound of jazz.' When I read Matthew Daddona's book of poems, House of Sound, I have to say, 'The poetry of Matthew Daddona is the sound of poetry.' It is. Daddona's poems are sonically and visually brilliant. I mean brilliant, twofold. One, they light up the world. Two, they exist in a domain of magical surprise. There are the little moments of lyrical beacons like, 'The roof is aflutter. / Michael calls / Starlings, Darlings, ' and then there are the large heart monasteries like, 'I know this: sound can make / a heart break like glass / and that there are two sounds / for every / one heart.' That is what this book is, a heart monastery, and each poem has at least two sounds for its one big heart. Within the sound of his poems there is a silence, and in this silence, there is a world of image and light, big light, that sweeps across the landscape of human experience and implores you to listen. When you read House of Sound, listen aflutter. Read these poems to yourself. Read them out loud to yourself and then quietly to your beloved. Be beloved with these poems so you can be beloved with the world."

-Matthew Lippman, author of Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful

"Matthew Daddona's intimate inhabitation of grief gives us a mother, returns her to us briefly in the breath between lyrics, in the haunted landscape of loss, in the shadows that cling to a wife and children. The work of memory is this delicate reconstitution, a tenuous, shameless tendering of awe for life in the country of loss."

-Alina Stefanescu, author of Every Mask I Tried On and Stories to Read Aloud to Your Fetus

"Matthew Daddona's House of Sound takes the reader to a contemplative space that only the best poetry can. Daddona's dexterous command of language unfurls into stanzas of startling insight. His writing is crystalline, alternating between existential long shots and close-ups of moments so intimate and well-drawn they will break your heart. House of Sound is as smart as it is sensuous, as metaphysical as it is touching. I recommend this book to all the searchers out there."

-Caroline Hagood, author of Ways of Looking at a Woman and Having Maxine's Baby

"House of Sound is an exploration on modern living - its conversational nature makes the reader feel like they are the characters, right in the story and world the speaker brings us into. The anxieties over existing, personal bonds and relationships, and existential dread are all too familiar, and comfort us as we try to find ourselves nudging from darkness into light, from isolation to kinship."

-Joanna C. Valente, author of Marys of the Sea and editor of Yes, Poetry