Days & Days: Poems - Hardcover

Dickman, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0525655476 ISBN 13: 9780525655473

Publisher: Knopf, 2019

An exhilarating and far-ranging meditation on days and how we live in them in the twenty-first century, from the award-winning poet.

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.

About the Author:

MICHAEL DICKMAN is the author of three books of poems, The End of the West (2009), Flies (2011, winner of the James Laughlin Award), and Green Migraine (2015), and coauthor, with his twin brother, of 50 American Plays (Poems) (2012), and Brother (2016). He lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is on the faculty at Princeton University.

Review:

Praise for Days & Days

“With nuanced juxtapositions, skillful interruptions, and repetition that heightens the wit, [Dickman’s] poems careen through point-of-view shifts and elucidate a sometimes bleak but familiar interiority, lending language to isolation.” —Danielle Vermette, The Oregonian

“A kaleidoscope of images surfacing for air out of our commercialized landscape. This acute poet’s sharp, spare lines bring forward otherwise-missed moments in our common experiences . . . The poignant heart of this skilled collection is the long poem ‘Lakes Rivers Streams,’ an astounding poem that when read in one go pulls the reader in as if he or she is caught in a river’s strong current. The flotsam and jetsam of the tactile and the ardent congruity of being human and alive ripple through this skillfully navigated poem . . . Dickman offers a gentle swirl of rediscovered everydayness, and, after all, isn’t that what poetry should do on occasion, realign the everyday anew?” —Raúl Niño, Booklist

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0525655476
• ISBN 13: 9780525655473
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 136