Michael Dickman’s intuitive, agile verse captures us in its unusual pulse. Image-driven and shape-driven, the poems of Days & Days touch on parenthood, childhood, local natural habitats, graffiti culture, roses, and romantic love. Dickman considers both the internal and external vistas that open before him in the course of a day, the memories and the immediate quandaries. The long centerpiece poem, “Lakes Rivers Streams,” is a reverie that picks up the flotsam of parenting days on its current. Other poems account for hotel days, or days spent watching TV, taking prescription drugs, watching butterflies. Throughout, we feel the dazzling originality of Dickman’s awareness; he meets the brutality, banality, and strange beauty of the quotidian with a level gaze, and with an urgent musicality that carries us beyond these lines and pages.
MICHAEL DICKMAN was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of four collections of poems, including Flies, winner of the 2010 James Laughlin Award, and Days & Days, a New York Times Best Poetry Book of 2019. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is on the faculty at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts.
View titles by Michael Dickman
Michael Dickman’s intuitive, agile verse captures us in its unusual pulse. Image-driven and shape-driven, the poems of Days & Days touch on parenthood, childhood, local natural habitats, graffiti culture, roses, and romantic love. Dickman considers both the internal and external vistas that open before him in the course of a day, the memories and the immediate quandaries. The long centerpiece poem, “Lakes Rivers Streams,” is a reverie that picks up the flotsam of parenting days on its current. Other poems account for hotel days, or days spent watching TV, taking prescription drugs, watching butterflies. Throughout, we feel the dazzling originality of Dickman’s awareness; he meets the brutality, banality, and strange beauty of the quotidian with a level gaze, and with an urgent musicality that carries us beyond these lines and pages.
MICHAEL DICKMAN was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of four collections of poems, including Flies, winner of the 2010 James Laughlin Award, and Days & Days, a New York Times Best Poetry Book of 2019. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is on the faculty at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts.
View titles by Michael Dickman
