Parlando II: Selected Poems

Most of RCD's formal energy derives from the brilliant jazz-blown waves of participial phrasing. Over and over again, a prepositional phrase is risen out of stasis by gerund. In the clickety-click ching of his lines, he delivers the adrenalinic music of the centurys' explorers who went off for story and returned with poems, then went off again. Dickson's poems insist that, searched well, the world has many astonishing and sustaining beauties-human, aural, kinetic. And the poems also insist that the inquisitive, fraternal drive toward the next day is probably the world's most alluring beauty. To open these pages is to begin that drive. (From Parlando, Kerouac Connection Press, Menlo Park, CA, July 2000) -Kevin Clark, Ph.D. Essayist, Critic, Poet, Professor of English, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, CA Ray Clark Dickson is father of the new West Coast poetry-sings like Blake, burns like Bukowski. RCD does blue-collar and white-collar poetry in the same laundry. He follows readings here by Derek Walcott and Norman Mailer. -D.G. Wills, D.G. Wills Books, La Jolla, California