Before Leaving the Island

# Review: Before Leaving the Island **Author:** John Fadely **City:** Seattle **Stars:** 4/5 **Generated:** 2026-04-04 (GPT-4o) **Word Count:** 447

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John Fadely's poems begin with specific places: Maui, cycling through time, thoughts about humans and connection. *Before Leaving the Island* is a collection that thinks carefully about the intersection of nature, identity, and mortality. The poems don't explain themselves. They sit with an image and let you discover what's beneath it.

Fadely's strength is his ear for language. The rhythmic quality of individual lines carries meaning beyond their literal content. "Meditation on Maui" captures something real about a place where land meets sea, where you can stand still and feel the weight of history and geography converging. The poem doesn't need to explain why Maui matters. The language does that work.

The collection returns again and again to themes of time and memory. "Cycling Through" moves through past and present simultaneously, using the simple metaphor of a bike ride to examine how time compounds, how memory mixes with the present moment. The poem has nostalgia in it, but not in a way that sentimentalizes. Fadely's approach is more unsettling—time is always slipping away, memories are never stable, and the self we remember ourselves being isn't quite the self we are.

"Spare a Thought for the Humans" is haunting. Here Fadely's command of language and rhythm reaches toward something elemental—human connection, the brief nature of existence, the smallness of individual lives against the weight of time. The poem doesn't answer any of these preoccupations. It just lets you sit in them.

Fadely doesn't write accessible poetry. His work ventures into abstraction, and some poems feel more connected to his own interior landscape than to anything a reader might latch onto. That abstraction is sometimes a limitation—you can feel lost, uncertain if you're understanding what he's after. But the abstraction is also what gives the poems depth. They're not trying to tell you something; they're trying to show what it feels like to stand in uncertainty and try to make meaning from it.

The collection as a whole forms an arc, though not a strictly linear one. The poems circle themes, return to similar questions, approach common ground from different angles. There's coherence in the collection even when individual poems feel disjointed.

Fadely's language is always precise. He doesn't waste words. Even the most abstract poem has a clean economy to it. That precision makes the poetry rewarding to sit with. You can keep returning to a poem and find new resonances in the language, new connections in the imagery.

*Before Leaving the Island* is for readers comfortable with ambiguity and willing to sit with a poem that doesn't immediately yield its meaning. Fadely's work is that kind of poetry—it asks for attention, asks for patience, asks for you to bring your own experience to the poem. That's not the most popular kind of poetry, but it's the real kind. It's the kind that matters.

★★★★☆