CD Collins: Subtracting Down Review by
Doug Holder

Doug Holder

Dec.27 2004

“Somerville Poet and Vocalist  C. D. Collins Releases a poetry and music CD “Subtracting Down.”

I had coffee with Somerville poet C.D. Collins at Sherman’s in Union Square, Somerville recently, and she handed me a brand new CD with an encased chapbook of lyrics and poetry. The chapbook is beautifully illustrated with vintage hand-colored postcards from Bill Ishmael’s collection of Kentucky postcards. Collins told me the title of her CD is “Subtracting Down” because she feels an affinity for the notion of getting back to her Kentucky roots; to shed all “ the things we carry” in our complicated lives, and sit back and enjoy the moment. Throughout this chap Collins presents the reader with vivid down-home imagery generously mixed with nostalgia, longing, and some regret. In “Promised Candy” Collins remembers her “ancestral” vegetable beef soup her father prepared. She pens a beautifully rendered passage about this culinary symbol from her past: “What I really want to say is that I/ shopped for bones at Star Market in Cambridge/ beef bones I roasted in a pan/ while sautéing onions, carrots, mushrooms in the big Dutch oven./ I deglazed the bones with good red wine from Italy/ added it to the soup along with herbs/ chopped tomatoes, barley... Simmered for a few hours to let the flavors blend/ carried it to the new house and fed the carpenters./ What I really want to say is that I don’t know who I am anymore/ I have reabsorbed like mist into the ocean/ I feel the hollow when I trail after/someone leaving in the snow/ please don’t go.” The way to this critic’s heart is through his stomach. My own poetry often deals with food, and I spent a year of my life writing a thesis about food in the fiction of Henry Roth. I can say that this bowl of soup is a work of art. The other poems in this collection are rich with character studies, history, you name it. If this chap is any indication of the quality of the music, and my good friends musicians Jennifer Matthews and Richard Wilhelm were very impressed with the CD, it should be every Somervillian’s civic duty to get their hot little hands on one.