“Horses in the Fog,” David Jaicks’ new book of five short stories, is inviting. You want to pick it up and look into it. Small, tastefully designed, illustrated with simple woodcuts of unspecific trees and roads, it is a chapbook. His folksy stories fit chapbook form, which are, historically, short, pocket-sized books for popular reading. Some of the stories in “Horses in the Fog” are contemporary stylized and mythic tales. Some seem inspired by real events.

His crisp, humorous physical descriptions of Ginny and Sid, the characters in his wistful, romantic title story “Horses in the Fog,” set up the two as if they were places rather than individuals.

Bodi, a rich young man featured in “The Money Tree,” with the help of his unnamed girlfriend, comes up with a satisfying, quirky way to deal with his finances.
“Clip Clop Little Shoes” gently shows how dogs have fun in the modern world.

“Intersection” displays protagonist Ron’s many immediate crossroads as he drives out in his truck one night shortly before his pregnant wife is to give birth to their baby.

The unnamed narrator of “Heroes” tells about his own life searches for inner growth as well as for a girlfriend and that of his hero, Ken, whom he meets at a residential therapeutic community.

In everyday language with no vulgarity in words, interactions or feelings, Jaicks writes in a compassionate, tender “guy” voice about kind thoughts, manly actions and pursuits including trucks, dogs, drag racing, drinking, bars, carpentry or woodworking. His women, however, have strength and at least as much character as his men.

Jaicks begins “Horses in the Fog” saying “Ginny had a smaller-framed body but she was a powerhouse of brown hair that seemed to drape and pile off her head in ringlets like an abundance of harvested grapes.”

Her looks and her character in a sentence.

He introduces Sid into the story and into Ginny’s life in one sentence as well.

“Ginny found a seat right off alongside a man who was a head taller than everyone else.”

He moves into “The Money Tree” with a side character.

“Lucy was no good at working. That fact had been proven. But what she did seem to have, which really was a talent that no one could deny, lived in a part of her body that would be a surprise to anyone, her nose.

Lucy had a marvelous ability to smell people who had money.”

Jaicks’ slightly rambling style also fits a chapbook’s historical intent. His characters are more archetypal than specific and detailed. Their actions and interactions seem symbolic of something just outside the actual story that the reader can feel, but not quite name. His plots are more interior journeys than active narratives.

Jaicks, who lives in Great Barrington, started out a poet and his stories are spare of words, as he, himself, said in a telephone interview.

He said these are nubs of stories he reduced to perhaps a 10th of their original length through long rewriting.

He published two books of his poetry, “River Rock Poems” and “Driving Home,”before putting out his short novel “Dog Park” in 2010. He said he hopes to amuse and entertain his readers.

Copyright © 2013 Berkshire Eagle 03/10/2013

• Clip Clop Little Shoes
• Heroes
• Horses in the Fog
• Intersection
• The Money Tree

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Sometimes while driving home
I’ll see a cloth of clouds
polishing over that high bluff and rock,
as if it were getting a good shine.

Sometimes while driving home
I will remember
how I polished my dad’s shoes
when I was a child.

He paid fifteen cents a shoe.
I thought it was a good deal
then and I still do now.

He even adjusted for inflation.
I got a nickel more every year,
and then it became a dime.

Then sometimes I’ll be driving home
and think
how the mountain and the man
have become the same.

I remember the feeble attempts at a volleyball game in the backyard. The ball would volley once or twice over the net then go skidding sideways off the hand of someone’s big sister. Then one of us would have to pick carefully through the poison ivy to retrieve it from the woods.

I remember the dogs, of course. The Collies with their dense fur pack and long pointed noses like camp saws.

And I remember sitting on the edge of the picnic bench at the end of the night, next to my mom, pinching and flopping the loose skin on the backside of her arm while she talked. It reminded me of turkey skin and I called it her gobbler.

-(taken from Driving Home)

-(from Driving Home)

My friend Bill used to say that Snowflake would smile so hard when you said hello to him that his eyes would squeeze shut.

Everyone in the town knew him. He was a local fixture. On weekends, drinking at night in the bars, we would walk out onto the sidewalk and there he would be happy to see us, with his eyes shining and goofy grin.

The generations of classes would come to the town and go, and each of us would be lost in our own majestic dreams of glory and success, we didn’t think of him much as belonging to us in in the way that he might have felt we belonged to him.

To him, though, we might have been his family, of which he may have had little of, the kind we had known.

He saw many things out there at night, I believe. Some good and some not so good. No one ever really seemed to know his mind. And maybe he wanted more from life than he seemed to have been given, but couldn’t escape the walls that kept him alone.

But with his goofy grin and attempt at words from his broken mouth and mind, you always felt he knew what really mattered. To value love and to be kind.

At night he would get up from wherever he was sitting near the sidewalk, pick up his bags and start walking, tipping from side to side , like a single empty box car on a train back to a room.

Somewhere in the night we lie back to back like two men about to duel each other. Couldn’t you see us march off one pace and try and blast each other off the corners of the mattress? We’d probably miss and go back to sleeping back to back while pieces of drywall hinged by the wallpaper dangled around us.

Sometimes when he is dreaming he lays with his legs over the edge, his paws twitching and bending gently like fishing poles when the fish are biting.

And me, I go about finding my dreams like laying leaves on a beautiful river.

From the basic perspective of getting to know the regulars of a dog park (among other locations), Jaicks focuses in on the characters — their differences and the interactions that bring them together, beyond exercising their dogs (although dogs are characters in the storyline as well).

The book draws you in as Jaicks covers the fertile ground of human personalities. There is Claire, a guileless young woman who is at the point of her life where her choices will put her very different paths. There is the likable and clever Pete, who makes you think there is more going on than meets the eye. There are other characters and primarily the protagonist –a caring soul who can sometimes only stand by and watch things unfold. Through this window, Jaicks shows us a slice of the world in its sweet sadness and glory reflected by the characters and their situations.

You can read the book in a single sitting, as I did recently on a 4-hour flight, but don’t read it too fast, because there are parts that are better savored thoughtfully. And, as with his other books, it happened again, I came away with a fresh perspective. After all, isn’t that what good books do –take us out of our lives and make us look at and think about the world a little differently?

    – Clifford Gately

Great Barrington’s David Agar Jaicks has released a follow-up to his 2010 poetry book”Driving Home.”

In “Dog Park” he veers away from standard poetry and has written his first published short story about a man, James, and his relationship with his beloved dog, Benny. (Perhaps James is Jaicks himself but that is unclear.)

Benny consistently draws James into social interactions that, due to his quiet, reserved personality, would have passed him by otherwise.

Like Jaicks previous work, “Dog Park” is a gift book akin to an exteded, touching greeting card that is appropriate for a one-
sitting first read.

Although not a collection of poems, it is a collection of both characters and reflective prose chapters that are poetic in overall quality.
Jaicks builds a light familiarity with some of the people James encounters frequently, but the reader is not tied to the plotline.

In subsequent readings, one can easily open the pages to favorite passages for a brief respite, or to simply take in the summer-like atmospere of the rolling hills of the small dog park in which Benny is free to frolic.

Underneath the surface of James’ encounters, a basic humanity is shared among a diverse demographic; people who are pulled together by the shared interest of dog ownership.

Jaicks has a simple, sraightforward approach to pointing out a kinship where, outside a central focused location, there would assumedly be none.
James’ thoughts are a pleasant mix of contemplations triggered by natural stimuli like sights along the road, and reactions to activities happening around him.
Jaicks stays true to James’ nature by staying away from bravado actions that alter the courses of lives, and , instead, shows how gentle living can create ripples of change for the better as people simply get to know each other.

He has a knack for sifting through common day-to-day moments and uncovering little jewels of subtle meaning.

Jody Kordana
- The Berkshire Eagle