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.