Lots to love about “Darby, Love…”

“Darby” in the book title, is Darby Hudson, a writer and poet from Melbourne, Australia. “Darby, love…” is how his mother addressed him. That’s how she’d start a sentence, “Darby, love…” – and so on. I found this a rather appealing little double entendre. It can mean that “love” is her nickname for him, or that it’s one term like “Darby-love”, or that she is about to tell him something about love.

However you read the title, it is abundantly clear in the book, which consists of things that his mother had said to him, that she loved him dearly. The book is about Darby and his mom, and it is about love and living.

The things his mom said are written all in caps, in a typeface that looks like mechanical typewriting, giving it a vintage, human feel. It’s interesting that the book is categorized as poetry, but while it is poetic, it’s not in recognizably poetic forms. I feel it’s more of a memoir in poetic prose.

(For this discovery, I have forgiven Instagram for being such a pain in the butt, with the grandstanding, perfectionism, and virtue signalling. People, ordinary people like me, just like what he observes and writes. And I noticed their comments, and discovered his writing. So, thanks, IG People.)

All I could say, when I’d finished reading it, is that his mother must have been an extraordinary person. And even if, sometimes, the way he recorded her words hint that they may not be her words verbatim, but his, it doesn’t take away from the moving and thought-provoking experience. The last entry reads:

“Darby, love, I’m dead now. […] It’s a bit silly, love. I wouldn’t phrase half the things how you’ve written them. And did I really say some of those things? I probably did. But you channeled my spirit and caught it. What a collaboration between the living and the dead! You are me as I am you.”

A thread between mom and son

The passages are bits from emails, letters, texts, recorded conversations from mother to son. After a while I thought they were like diary entries. All of them reveal two things: his mother understood and supported him, and she saw wonder and humour all around her. Some of the passages are laugh-out-loud funny, and I chuckled to myself quite often.

There is a thread running through the entries – some are her reactions to something that he had said or done. The focus changes in a few places, and you pick up on some aspects of the author’s life in the way that his mother observed and supported him. But those is quite subtle. The genre form, plot, theme, or narrative devices are not the important aspects of the book. The characterization and dialogue are.

Plain to see and hard to ignore

What will strike you immediately is that the contents is only 119 pages long, and on 117 of those pages, there are just a few lines of these conversations between mother and son, written in caps, centred on the page, in quotation marks. That’s it. There is an epigraph which is another quote from his mom, bringing the actual number of entries to 118. So, 118 quotes. That’s a lot of quotes, but having them there, so succinct, unadorned, undesigned – unframed, so to speak – means that you concentrate on each separate one. The numbers stuck with me. It was as though, afterwards, I was making sure that I hadn’t missed anything, and that I’d been hoping for more.

Other than those pages, and five pages of publishing details, the book is characterized by what is not there. There are no chapters or parts, no contents page, no annotations, no decorations except one small graphic, and only three black-and-white photos of him and his mom. Every passage, sentence, or entry, just sits there on the page, plain as the nose on your face. Or not so plainly, some of them.

Since it is a book that has fewer words than a novel, and fewer pages than a long short story, the significance of every part of the narrative gets concentrated. Some entries are more striking and thought-provoking than others, because they make you recall your own relationship with your mother. But, amongst all that, here is the first one that caught my attention and drew me in. I think it’s sweet and silly, and I can imagine the scene.

*I CALL MOM*
*MOM MAKES PIGEON COOING SOUNDS*
*I WHISTLE BIRD SOUNDS BACK*
*WE LAUGH*
*CALL ENDS*

(What? You’ve never just made funny noises at a loved one, or used words only you two can understand? Of course you have.)

Now there’s a woman with a sense of humour, I thought. I found myself hunting for traces of the real woman in the words. One entry reveals that she was a lawyer, another that she took long meetings with clients (while wearing a watch that did not tell the time), another that she lived alone, and many entries show that she did exactly whatever she wanted to do, no matter how strange or chaotic it was.

Almost every entry demonstrates that she loved all the amazingness of the world and the universe. She was a lawyer with the soul of an artist and an infectious wit, as this entry reveals:

“DARBY, LOVE, MY OLD, BARELY WORKING
RECORD PLAYER WOBBLES OUT MUSIC LIKE
IT’S HAUNTED. I CAN’T AFFORD TO FIX IT, BUT
I’VE COME TO LIKE HAUNTED TCHAIKOVSKY
AND HANDEL. IT’S STILL INCREDIBLE.”

I think I’d also like haunted Tchaikovsky and Handel, wouldn’t you?

This love they had, this connection of “…you are me as I am you”, comes through so clearly in the book that reading it is like having a small warm flame in your chest. You feel it, literally. His mom loved so many things – it reminded me that there are (still) things to marvel at that actually cost nothing.

“DARBY, LOVE, SOMETIMES I WONDER: HOW MANY
SUNSETS IS A LIFE WORTH? EVEN JUST ONE
WOULD BE ENOUGH. A SUNSET WITH A SIGH.”

Get it and read it

So, having sung the praises of this little book (it is little in size; 12.95 x 1.78 x 20.83 cm, not little in value), I urge you to do yourself a favour – and not even for some kind of “day” like Mother’s Day: Buy it and support the author. And read it to give yourself a break from the relentless darkness, meanness, and superficiality of the world these days. Read it. Then re-read it, and browse it. You’ll feel better for it.

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Afterwards, I thought, Mr. Hudson, some of these things are just words waiting to be shaped into lyrics and set to music. Someone should make songs from the “Alive things Mom said to me before she died.”

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Publishing details

Cover title styled in caps. Copyright title: Darby, Love…by Darby Hudson
Family Poetry, Death, Grief & Loss Poetry, Love Poems; US Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing; 1st edition; October 7, 2025; hard cover; 128 pages; ISBN 979-8-8816-0725-8; EEA publisher: Simon and Schuster, Netherlands

More about Darby Hudson