With Sober Ghost Jeffrey Skinner presents the reader with a kind of eschatology of the past, as well as of the future. He writes of visitations by the "ghosts" of a life's worth of people loved and lost, including father and mother, as well as previous selves. One of those ghostly selves is addicted to drugs and alcohol, and even though "present" Skinner has been clean for nearly half his years, the alcoholic self is a stubborn one, ever ready with an itemized list of the catastrophic errors and choices of the past. Nevertheless, the book retains Skinner's usual humor, as well as his unique, shaded species of hope. The poems leave the reader with a redemptive glow, in which the vastness of our ignorance is balanced against our joy in creation, and our joy in each other.
With Sober Ghost Jeffrey Skinner presents the reader with a kind of eschatology of the past, as well as of the future. He writes of visitations by the "ghosts" of a life's worth of people loved and lost, including father and mother, as well as previous selves. One of those ghostly selves is addicted to drugs and alcohol, and even though "present" Skinner has been clean for nearly half his years, the alcoholic self is a stubborn one, ever ready with an itemized list of the catastrophic errors and choices of the past. Nevertheless, the book retains Skinner's usual humor, as well as his unique, shaded species of hope. The poems leave the reader with a redemptive glow, in which the vastness of our ignorance is balanced against our joy in creation, and our joy in each other.