MEMOIR OF A SOUL

In Homecoming Parade, Mark Sanders has etched his boyhood visions and perceptions so deeply into his sensitive heart that he didn’t have to try to remember all the details—“They have remembered themselves all these years” (John Neihardt quoting Black Elk). Indeed, his remarkable memory floods the readers with joyful/sorrowful events from early childhood—the death of his sister, cruelty of elementary teachers, his “punch out” toys when others had real ones, getting to memorize poems, countless family gatherings—on up to his uncanny precognitions of others’ deaths.

The narrative is awash with “breath and wind, swirling in surreal whisperings and echoey voices.”  Swirls of snow, fireworks, “faces appearing and disappearing” manifest here. The work is rich with literary allusions and quotations and is not lacking in philosophy, psychology, or even mysticism in its poetic prose.

In the beginning essay, also named “Homecoming Parade,” Sanders invites the reader, as well as the town folk of Creighton, Nebraska, to “come.” “Come old men with bibbed overhauls . . . Come families toting children . . . Come lonely hungry ones…” “Come the commodity of music” and “something like prayer.”  His visualized prayer of the parade is not unlike what Tibetan Buddhists call the Bardo realms, the place where the soul journeys after death to complete unfinished business.

In “Arithmetic,” Sanders and his wife reopen and sort out a storage bin where, fifteen years ago, they left parts of their lives in the transition of many moves. They must decide what should be saved and what must be disposed of. Disposables include:’ two rocking chairs, three boxes of common baseball cards, dinosaurs, toy soldiers and scribbles which never became poems”. Some of the items to keep are “a four-foot Barbie doll, uncommon baseball cars, a grandmother’s baptism certificate, and blue and white family china .”This whole section could serve as a symbol of the entire memoir, where the author sorts through his early life, holding up bits and pieces to the light for study and understanding—witnessing, if you will. In the meditation practice of Mindfulness, the practitioner notes and releases mind thoughts and images in order to reach more awareness and become more conscious.

Feminists will note in “This Side of Center Line” that the narrator gallantly turns down a sexual offer from a drunken teenage friend, but because gossip has spread, he finds himself forced to participate in a drag race with her boyfriend. Readers might find themselves wishing for more scenes between him and the significant girls and women in his life.

Homecoming Parade is the “steam of his own breath and wind, life and death, pain and soul.”  He urges, “Onward, the parade, the ghosts, echoes.”  There is the ever-present “boy who is me staring out the pool hall window.”  Yes, Mark Sanders is the witness.

Barbara Schmitz is Emeritus Instructor of English at Northeast College where she taught writing and literature for thirty years and founded the Visiting Writers Series. Her latest books are What Bob Says (Some More) (WSC Press) and Always the Detail (SFA University Press), which won Honor Book in Poetry from the Nebraska Center for the Book 2015. Her work appeared in six poetry anthologies in 2017 including Nebraska Poetry: A Sesquicentennial Anthology and Nasty Women. She is the grandmother of Makena, lives with husband Bob in Norfolk, and considers herself The Poet of Highway 81 on whose banks she has written for forty years.

Mark Sanders is a native Nebraskan, born in Creighton and raised on the eastern rim of the Sandhills at Ord. His most recent books of poetry are Landscapes, with Horses (SFA Press, 2018) and In a Good Time (WSC Press, 2019). He was the 2007 recipient of the Mildred Bennett Award for fostering Nebraska’s literary heritage, and he has won four Nebraska Book Awards, a Spur Award, and the Western Heritage Award. He currently lives, works, and farms in east Texas.

Homecoming Parade
Mark Sanders
Perfect Paperback: 232 pages
WSC Press (2024) $14
ISBN: 978-1-7379241-8-0