Coming from Kelson Books in March 2025
“It takes a lot of imagination to believe in what is real.” In language personal, funny, sometimes heartbroken, these poems invite the reader into a world both vast and intimate. David Oates is a poet of tidal changes, of dark giving way to light (and vice versa) while we wonder what such beauty can mean against the travesty of human affairs.
The surprise that “comes slowly” might be love. Or healing. Or the slow march of global heating that takes out whole forests needle by needle. Oates takes us on walks by rivers and through forests, onto mountain-tops and islands floating in the golden sheen of twilight. On page after page love and heartache share the global stage where light itself threatens our biophysical existence – yet also arrives moment by moment from unthinkably far away, as if to redeem us. “Only something so random and so beautiful/can heal the heart. Hoist it up from grief,/ dry tears with the wry force of mere realness.”
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Advance praise for Surprise Comes Slowly
Whether he’s spending his hours “foolishly” or “lavishly,” David Oates is always “adding it all up” in poems that combine lucid images from the natural and civic world with an inward curiosity. Surprise Comes Slowly builds its poetry out of direct observation and intelligent generosity. Oates’s poems may begin with a specific geography, but they soon journey to uncharted places—always a “Bigger story unfolding”—evoking beauty and mystery, the fleeting winds of memory, and the meaning of life.
—David Biespiel, author of poetry including Republic Cafe and The Book of Men and Women. He is founder of The Attic Workshop for Writers in Portland, Oregon.
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In this book David Oates does what only accomplished poets can do, “crack[ing] the husk of this life,” as he puts it in “What Is the Poem of this Poem,” and “find[ing] within it a starry sky,” and he does this with amplitude and great facility and the apparent ability to make a line do whatever he wants it to. There are dazzling leaps here and what he calls, in describing a poem by another poet, “lyric magnitude,” and long, conversational riffs that get undercut as soon as they start to become too earnest by a sudden, apparently offhand phrase that really ends up affirming what Oates truly loves. Life is “kind of adorable, really,” as he says in “Beneath the Boulder.” These poems often seek a landscape. They are often about poetry, but without being cloying or self-involved. Music haunts these poems. Politics haunt these poems. Religion haunts these poems most of all, Oates’s long argument with churches and his joy in the mystery in every moment. “I say it’s all good,” he writes in “Redrock”: “good even for heartache, for answering / that wonder, that loneliness / that really just means we’re alive.”
—Chris Anderson, emeritus professor of English at Oregon State University, Catholic deacon, and author of Love Calls Us Here.
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A masterwork from an exceptionally accomplished writer, Surprise Comes Slowly is a wondrously welcome collection. In turns reflective, satiric, reverential, and playful, David Oates’s poems give us poignant and insightful glimpses into “the invisible machinery of living.” With inventive tropes, with compelling imagery, with remarkable political and personal wisdom, these deeply humane poems “spiral up and up / until the widening gyre finds at last the heart.” Praise be for David Oates and this work “flashing its signal across the darkness.” Five stars. Highly recommended.
—Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita
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Right from its opening epigraphs and prologue, Surprise Comes Slowly marks out an ample territory – from the sacred to the profane, from “goodness and mercy,” to the “twisted meanness” of contemporary politics. Sharpened by a consciousness of age, these poems wish not to miss anything in the moment, a wish always animated by “What must I be, what can it mean / that I keep trying to say?” The answers here become various, local, and underpinned always by an uncommon capacity for tenderness, a recognition that “darkness is grace,” that mystery is something you can pray to. In language at once informal and carefully wrought, Surprise Comes Slowly makes good company. “You, too,” it says, “you too can be ‘bold in the beauty of necessity.’ ”
—Lex Runciman, author of Unlooked For.
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David Oates’ feisty new poems embrace contradictions so tightly they squirm. He tells us “there are words in our mouths older than volcanos or gods / they come out utterly fresh and ancient,” then makes it happen again and again. In his restless quest for connections, his poems plunge forward then double back, boldly assert then reconsider, stitch forward and back until the pattern of his inquiry has woven something beautiful and convincing. Whether considering the death and decay of a possum, the vicissitudes of human relationships, or the fickleness even of mountains, he’s always on the lookout for “a standing wave of impermanence.” Surprise Comes Slowly is full of vivid instances of brief equipoise and fleeting grace.
—Charles Goodrich, author of Insects of South Corvallis (poetry) and Weave Me a Crooked Basket (novel).
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“What I know / mostly is that I don’t know,” admits David Oates in one poem. Yet Surprise Comes Slowly is saturated with knowledge gained from many years of living in, contemplating, and writing about the natural world and the ways humans interact with and within it. These deeply personal, exquisitely pensive poems feature a relentlessly inquisitive man simultaneously tormented by the often destructive behavior of humans and exhilarated by the natural world from which he continually learns. “Sometimes darkness is grace too,” he acknowledges. As impossible as it may be, he moves through his life “not wanting / to be caught disturbing anything.” But good poems do disturb by shaking us out of complacency and making us more attentive. Surprise Comes Slowly is an impressive collection filled with such poems.
—- Andrea Hollander, author of And Now, Nowhere But Here.
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Almost fifty years ago, I was roped to David Oates on a glacier in the Sierra and managed to fall forty feet through the roof of a crevasse. When at last I re-emerged into the bright land of the living, there was David, standing where the rope was anchored to a pair of buried snowshoes. The happiness I felt then is something like the happiness I feel now in clambering through these playful, thoughtful, honest, and endearing poems. Then as now, “I was surprised to find myself // a little, maybe, actually, there.” And maybe hoping and knowing, with David, “that in this tearing world could be a kindness, / a light that we could lead with and be led by.” Tie yourself to the braided strands of this collection and find at the other end a man who will help you brush the ice from the back of your neck.
—Paul J. Willis, author of Somewhere to Follow