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Within light there is darkness, but do not try to understand that darkness; within darkness there is light, but do not look for that light. Light and darkness are a pair, like the foot before and the foot behind, in walking.
—Sekito Risen, quoted in Shunryui Suzuki, Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness
I wish, like the characters in Sondheim's fairy tale musical Into the Woods, to begin this review of Fred Feirstein's new book of sixty new and previously published poems, titled Dark Energy, with the same words with which Sondheim begins each character's theme song. For in this collection of poems, also based on fairy tales, Feirstein knows, as does Sondheim, as did Freud, that it is more the act of wishing than the thing that is wished for itself that is enlivening and keeps us living in a hopeful, albeit at times, delusional mode.
It is my wish that more psychoanalysts were willing to struggle as openly and eloquently with the facts of their own mortality, sickness, and dread as Fred Feirstein is willing, in Dark Energy.
It is my wish that more people were as unpretentious and courageous as Feirstein reveals in his poem tided “Red Cross,” in which he admits, “I have no understanding anymore” (p. 65).
Feirstein affords his readers, in the poems of this versatile collection, a rare view into the heart and mind of a psychoanalyst and poet who moves effortlessly from one art form to the other, engaging the reader's own capacities for the poetics of psychoanalytic listening. In this sense his poetry functions as a gate, which swings open into the complexity of the fields in which the poems take place. For instance, the line “I have no understanding anymore” may be familiar to analysts, as spoken by patients in treatment. In the poem, it may be read as a discourse on hopelessness, a loss of faith in psychoanalysis and other attempts to resurrect the self of the patient and/or analyst. The line may also be read in the reverse, as a reference to Freud's foundational statement