Days & Days ― Poems

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.

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.