What do you think?
Rate this book
The End of the West
"Dickman's book moves with careful intensity as it confidently illuminates buried, contemporary suffering."—Publishers Weekly
"Elizabeth Bishop said that the three qualities she admired most in poetry were accuracy, spontaneity, and mystery. Michael Dickman's first full-length collection of poems demonstrates each brilliantly....These are lithe, seemingly effortless poems, poems whose strange affective power remains even after several readings. Again and again the language seems to disappear, leaving the reader with woven flashes of image, situation, emotion....These are durable poems from one of the most accomplished and original poets to emerge in years."—The Believer
"With vacant space and verbal economy, his work suggests volumes." —Poets & Writers
The poems in Michael Dickman’s energized debut document the bright desires and all-too-common sufferings of modern times: the churn of domestic violence, spiritual longing, drug abuse, and the impossible expectations fathers have for their sons. In a poem that references heroin and “scary parents,” Dickman reminds us that “Still there is a lot to pray to on earth.” Dickman is a poet to watch.
You can go blind, waiting
Unbelievable quiet
except for their
soundings
Moving the sea around
Unbelievable quiet inside you, as they change
the face of water
The only other time I felt this still was watching Leif shoot up when we were twelve
Sunlight all over his face
breaking
the surface of something
I couldn’t see
You can wait your
whole life
Michael Dickman was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, and began writing poems “after accidentally reading a Neruda ode.” His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and The American Poetry Review.
"Elizabeth Bishop said that the three qualities she admired most in poetry were accuracy, spontaneity, and mystery. Michael Dickman's first full-length collection of poems demonstrates each brilliantly....These are lithe, seemingly effortless poems, poems whose strange affective power remains even after several readings. Again and again the language seems to disappear, leaving the reader with woven flashes of image, situation, emotion....These are durable poems from one of the most accomplished and original poets to emerge in years."—The Believer
"With vacant space and verbal economy, his work suggests volumes." —Poets & Writers
The poems in Michael Dickman’s energized debut document the bright desires and all-too-common sufferings of modern times: the churn of domestic violence, spiritual longing, drug abuse, and the impossible expectations fathers have for their sons. In a poem that references heroin and “scary parents,” Dickman reminds us that “Still there is a lot to pray to on earth.” Dickman is a poet to watch.
You can go blind, waiting
Unbelievable quiet
except for their
soundings
Moving the sea around
Unbelievable quiet inside you, as they change
the face of water
The only other time I felt this still was watching Leif shoot up when we were twelve
Sunlight all over his face
breaking
the surface of something
I couldn’t see
You can wait your
whole life
Michael Dickman was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, and began writing poems “after accidentally reading a Neruda ode.” His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and The American Poetry Review.
- GenresPoetryContemporary
89 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2009
9 people are currently reading
383 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 61 reviews
July 3, 2016
I really liked this collection. I liked the seemingly casual flow of it, how it’s punctuated with everyday violence and sometimes shocking circumstance conveyed in a calm tone— friends on heroin, abusive parents (and children), relatives who drink. The voice is authentic and pulls you in to its world.
This is a fast read and I went back and reread much of it, looking for the phrasings and scenes that struck me. The poems use ample blank space: they breathe. There’s a lot of darkness, but there’s also heart — how the speaker wants to fuck his friends or how someone is going to get beat up and that’s how this particular person is alive.
Here’s part of “Some of the Men”
“Josh’s father —
Stumbling into the bedroom at three in the morning the two of us asleep
and all that moonlight
and beat his son’s
head against
the headboard
You fucker you fucker you asked for it
The moon
His jaw splashed across the pillowcase”
It’s a shock, sure, but it’s vivid and the phrasing is arresting. In places the poetry reminded me a bit of Franz Wright’s, who also takes a hard look at the suffering lives around and inside him, but this is more narrative, I think, the poems are less self-contained. Funny enough, Wright blurbed this book, saying “with utmost gravity as well as a kind of cosmic wit, Dickman gives a voice to the real life sorrows, horrors, and indomitable joys that bind together the vast human family,” right after he spends a couple lines complaining about contemporary poetry (“glib irony,” “gratuitous non-sequiturs,” “obscurities”). I like Wright’s poetry, too.
I don’t particularly care about writers’ personal lives. Some of them may reach a level of atrocity that’s hard to ignore but for the most part writers live lives like any human, I think. They're neither sainted nor pure evil; we can’t pretend to know their circumstances and I really don’t care. For me reading isn’t about celebrity watching, it’s about reading. So forgive me if I don’t know the backstory on this poet’s life or about his relationship with his brother, whom I haven’t read yet, etc. I hope to.
Here’s part of “My Autopsy,” though not the best part:
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/m...
I gave this four stars but I lean towards being more generous... give it a couple days.
This is a fast read and I went back and reread much of it, looking for the phrasings and scenes that struck me. The poems use ample blank space: they breathe. There’s a lot of darkness, but there’s also heart — how the speaker wants to fuck his friends or how someone is going to get beat up and that’s how this particular person is alive.
Here’s part of “Some of the Men”
“Josh’s father —
Stumbling into the bedroom at three in the morning the two of us asleep
and all that moonlight
and beat his son’s
head against
the headboard
You fucker you fucker you asked for it
The moon
His jaw splashed across the pillowcase”
It’s a shock, sure, but it’s vivid and the phrasing is arresting. In places the poetry reminded me a bit of Franz Wright’s, who also takes a hard look at the suffering lives around and inside him, but this is more narrative, I think, the poems are less self-contained. Funny enough, Wright blurbed this book, saying “with utmost gravity as well as a kind of cosmic wit, Dickman gives a voice to the real life sorrows, horrors, and indomitable joys that bind together the vast human family,” right after he spends a couple lines complaining about contemporary poetry (“glib irony,” “gratuitous non-sequiturs,” “obscurities”). I like Wright’s poetry, too.
I don’t particularly care about writers’ personal lives. Some of them may reach a level of atrocity that’s hard to ignore but for the most part writers live lives like any human, I think. They're neither sainted nor pure evil; we can’t pretend to know their circumstances and I really don’t care. For me reading isn’t about celebrity watching, it’s about reading. So forgive me if I don’t know the backstory on this poet’s life or about his relationship with his brother, whom I haven’t read yet, etc. I hope to.
Here’s part of “My Autopsy,” though not the best part:
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/m...
I gave this four stars but I lean towards being more generous... give it a couple days.
April 3, 2011
My mother waits for me
breathing easy
having let her hair go
silver, white
longer now
shining
in this
one of her many
afterlives
...so starts the longer title poem at the end of the book. Michael Dickman, unafraid of facing a brutal upbringing, brings us a sparse, symbolic, minimally-punctuated style. What the reader is left with, in the capacious blank spaces, is the depth of human lives lingering around death, sighing at hope.
The poetic and narrative strength here is the narrative of a boy, sometimes young, sometimes in his teens or twenties, slowly backing away from his environment, looking around at bitter contradictions. The pausing - short lines, stanzas and poems - leaves the reader sunken emotionally and with the people in Dickman's earlier life within stark lines. But in stepping into this universe one never feels deceived.
Dickman uses vivid, specific details in each poem, and powerful, open symbolism to bring a decaying world to life.
From the 3rd poem in one of my favorite series, "Returning to Church":
The light through the stained-glass window was snow
Do you want to be home forever?
Its all right if you do
Kiss me in the pew among strangers who aren't strangers but His
other homeless children
The light through the stained-lass window
was snow, not Grace
not Spirit
Not, lightly
His fingers
breathing easy
having let her hair go
silver, white
longer now
shining
in this
one of her many
afterlives
...so starts the longer title poem at the end of the book. Michael Dickman, unafraid of facing a brutal upbringing, brings us a sparse, symbolic, minimally-punctuated style. What the reader is left with, in the capacious blank spaces, is the depth of human lives lingering around death, sighing at hope.
The poetic and narrative strength here is the narrative of a boy, sometimes young, sometimes in his teens or twenties, slowly backing away from his environment, looking around at bitter contradictions. The pausing - short lines, stanzas and poems - leaves the reader sunken emotionally and with the people in Dickman's earlier life within stark lines. But in stepping into this universe one never feels deceived.
Dickman uses vivid, specific details in each poem, and powerful, open symbolism to bring a decaying world to life.
From the 3rd poem in one of my favorite series, "Returning to Church":
The light through the stained-glass window was snow
Do you want to be home forever?
Its all right if you do
Kiss me in the pew among strangers who aren't strangers but His
other homeless children
The light through the stained-lass window
was snow, not Grace
not Spirit
Not, lightly
His fingers
November 16, 2020
When I think of the childhood inside me I think of
sunlight dying on a windowsill
The voices of my friends
in the sunlight
All of us running around
outside our
deaths
sunlight dying on a windowsill
The voices of my friends
in the sunlight
All of us running around
outside our
deaths
November 26, 2019
I actually read this collection initially awhile ago and somehow didn't write up a review. Saw it on my to-read bookshelf with pages already folded over and decided to reread it for a fresh take on it for my review.
I feel enough (too much?) has been said about his relationship with his brother, so forgive me if I sidestep that discussion.
In the limited space I was offered on Copper Canyon's comment card, I wrote
Beautifully hollow. Violently calm. Such quiet language perfectly describing what is happening beneath suburban lives.
Maybe a bit melodramatic, but there have been claims by some that I lean that way from time to time. ;)
At any rate, I find it interesting that after so recently being bored at points by the simple language that Billy Collins uses, I find a poet who writes with a similar diction (I would never compare them too closely), but manages to make that language sing - regardless of what physical darkness it is presenting.
This man can write. These poems are musical, lively, original. Despite being often about horrifying subject matter (or, sometimes, because of it), his words absorb you as you are absorbed by them.
I almost gave it four stars because I didn't love the last long poem of the book, but there was just too much in here that knocked me out of my socks. I folded even more pages the second time through. Just a fantastic collection.
Edit:
Reread in November of 2019 – book eighteen of my 2019 favorite reread project/challenge. (I am getting there. It feels somewhat in reach to finish these 24 books in time other than all of the remaining books are novels, I believe.)
I reviewed this collection in 2011 so it is a more recent reread than a lot of these have been lately. (And it is nice to have my thoughts down from an earlier read. My daughter was one in 2011 so I am not surprised that I didn’t really remember my initial thoughts and feelings on this book…)
I would say first off that if I were to rate the book today, I would probably lean more towards four stars than five but I still very much liked the entire collection of poems (I feel like it is more of a “book” than a lot of poetry collections that I read if that makes sense). The most interesting difference between this and my earlier review (that I just went back and read to see what I had to say…) is that I very much liked the long poem that finished out the book which I apparently did not feel quite as much last time. This seems to be a bit of a theme with this reread project – I am finding that I like a lot of longer poems than I did (even only eight years ago, apparently) upon first reading. I must be a more patient reader than I was though I strangely feel less patient much of the time (for instance, I read a lot less long form prose than I used to. I find that a novel has to really hook me to hold my interest these days.). Long poetry seems to be my jam right now though.
Dickman’s sparseness is interesting to me. There is a lot not being said in this collection, a lot of reading between the lines that the reader is asked to do. There is this underlying darkness/pain/anger that simmers through the book, the lines dipping into it and then playfully dancing away. I love that Dickman can use a plain, easy language to approach depth in an interesting way. There is a sparseness to the text that I like – these short lines almost approaching Asian forms at times. There is a (very short) line length that Dickman prefers and he seldom strays from it (and these short lines aren’t something that I see in a lot of modern American verse) but it just absolutely works. Sometimes playful, sometimes raw, the turns of these poems are often surprising.
Rereading my review of his next book, Flies, makes me wonder if I would like it more at this point. I am always interested when I have vastly different reactions to multiple books by the same author.
At any rate, I greatly enjoyed this book still and I am glad that I returned to it.
I feel enough (too much?) has been said about his relationship with his brother, so forgive me if I sidestep that discussion.
In the limited space I was offered on Copper Canyon's comment card, I wrote
Beautifully hollow. Violently calm. Such quiet language perfectly describing what is happening beneath suburban lives.
Maybe a bit melodramatic, but there have been claims by some that I lean that way from time to time. ;)
At any rate, I find it interesting that after so recently being bored at points by the simple language that Billy Collins uses, I find a poet who writes with a similar diction (I would never compare them too closely), but manages to make that language sing - regardless of what physical darkness it is presenting.
This man can write. These poems are musical, lively, original. Despite being often about horrifying subject matter (or, sometimes, because of it), his words absorb you as you are absorbed by them.
I almost gave it four stars because I didn't love the last long poem of the book, but there was just too much in here that knocked me out of my socks. I folded even more pages the second time through. Just a fantastic collection.
Edit:
Reread in November of 2019 – book eighteen of my 2019 favorite reread project/challenge. (I am getting there. It feels somewhat in reach to finish these 24 books in time other than all of the remaining books are novels, I believe.)
I reviewed this collection in 2011 so it is a more recent reread than a lot of these have been lately. (And it is nice to have my thoughts down from an earlier read. My daughter was one in 2011 so I am not surprised that I didn’t really remember my initial thoughts and feelings on this book…)
I would say first off that if I were to rate the book today, I would probably lean more towards four stars than five but I still very much liked the entire collection of poems (I feel like it is more of a “book” than a lot of poetry collections that I read if that makes sense). The most interesting difference between this and my earlier review (that I just went back and read to see what I had to say…) is that I very much liked the long poem that finished out the book which I apparently did not feel quite as much last time. This seems to be a bit of a theme with this reread project – I am finding that I like a lot of longer poems than I did (even only eight years ago, apparently) upon first reading. I must be a more patient reader than I was though I strangely feel less patient much of the time (for instance, I read a lot less long form prose than I used to. I find that a novel has to really hook me to hold my interest these days.). Long poetry seems to be my jam right now though.
Dickman’s sparseness is interesting to me. There is a lot not being said in this collection, a lot of reading between the lines that the reader is asked to do. There is this underlying darkness/pain/anger that simmers through the book, the lines dipping into it and then playfully dancing away. I love that Dickman can use a plain, easy language to approach depth in an interesting way. There is a sparseness to the text that I like – these short lines almost approaching Asian forms at times. There is a (very short) line length that Dickman prefers and he seldom strays from it (and these short lines aren’t something that I see in a lot of modern American verse) but it just absolutely works. Sometimes playful, sometimes raw, the turns of these poems are often surprising.
Rereading my review of his next book, Flies, makes me wonder if I would like it more at this point. I am always interested when I have vastly different reactions to multiple books by the same author.
At any rate, I greatly enjoyed this book still and I am glad that I returned to it.
October 24, 2009
This collection didn't hit hit. Perhaps, my palate has not been cleansed, having just read Siken's "Crush" and reveling in his long, impassioned lines. In contrast, Dickman is so sparse and distant, more of the air than the ground. He left me wanting more. If you like Dickman, you might take a peek at Nick Flynn's "Some Ether."
May 9, 2023
It took me a little while to get into it, but I really liked it by the end. My poetry mentor gave it to me in February, but I just now got around to it. It’s kind of a mix of OKD and Siken… but also a very unique and different thing altogether. Even when I wasn’t big into the poem as a whole, every poem had lines that just twisted the dagger in my heart.
February 9, 2025
It’s a frustrating sort of joy to find a poetry book with which you simply connect. Everything in Dickman’s style, subject matter, white space on the page, feeling of hope and loss, everything clicks with my heart as I read these. I feel like I’ve let out a scream and also whispered a quiet prayer for the future. Read it slowly, and think about the words until they’re yours.
August 23, 2019
Enigmatic and beautiful.
February 28, 2022
This debut collection is exemplary of “the randomness, the glib irony Rilke strenuously warned against, the gratuitous non sequiturs and obscurities for obscurity’s sake which have been so fashionable in [American] poetry for the past couple of decades, and which make it so difficult to determine whether or not a poet has talent or anything significant to tell us,” contrary to Franz Wright’s praise of these poems. A few lines from “Nervous System”:
“I wish I could look down past the burning chandelier inside me
where the language begins
to end
and
down”
“I wish I could look down past the burning chandelier inside me
where the language begins
to end
and
down”
July 12, 2009
Michael Dickman is the antidote to Matthew Dickman. When you've grown weary of Matthew, reach for Michael and he will revive you. They write on essentially the same themes, but they are stylistically yin and yang. Where Matthew is charming, Michael is brooding. Where Matthew is wordy, Michael is spare. Where Matthew is exterior, Michael is Interior. They are perfect foils for each other. Buy both books as a present for yourself.
June 29, 2009
I really enjoyed moments in this collection, but overall, no poems truly spoke to me, though each was very powerful. I felt that perhaps Dickman's poetry was a little too graphic at moments, and much of it felt profoundly sad. At the end, I felt disturbed, which is maybe what one is meant to feel, but I didn't particularly like the unsettling feeling with which I was left, though I know it will stay with me for some time.
March 7, 2022
I had a copy of a book of poems by the author's twin brother, Michael Dickman, in college that I loved. Read it constantly. I marked this as "to read" back then, maybe 2008 or 2009. I sat down and read it over the past two days. It is not very similar to what I remember of his brothers poetry. It is sad and spare and seems to be focused on late childhood and adolescence. Drugs, suicide, difficult relationships with parents. I was going to give it three or four stars, but as I read, the rhythms of the poems began to feel more regular and I got into it. Then the long title poem at the end really impressed me. Bringing together and extending a lot of the themes without things needing to fit together too neatly.
This wasn't nostalgic, because I'd never read it before, but it made me think about how much I liked to read poetry and how impactful it could feel fifteen or so years ago. It's a feeling worth chasing sometimes.
This wasn't nostalgic, because I'd never read it before, but it made me think about how much I liked to read poetry and how impactful it could feel fifteen or so years ago. It's a feeling worth chasing sometimes.
September 12, 2017
I have read some of Matthew Dickman but I am new to his brother Michael. I loved this book-the short lines, the white space, the simple language that is so evocative.
It is a book to read slowly, to sit with, to contemplate. I looked for some lines to quote and almost everything jumped out at me, resonated not in my head but my gut. That's the kind of poet Michael Dickman is.
It is a book to read slowly, to sit with, to contemplate. I looked for some lines to quote and almost everything jumped out at me, resonated not in my head but my gut. That's the kind of poet Michael Dickman is.
January 31, 2020
Short book of very good poetry. Since I have read some of the other readers' comments, I will go out on a limb and say I believe there is a great deal of pain buried here. Its not out in the open, which is probably how I would express things, were I inclined to do so. But I am worried about imposing my own presumptions upon the poetry in a review of it, so it is expressed probably correctly.
May 12, 2023
Loved this book. Read a poem/section a day and looked forward to it. Have been reading his brother Matthew Dickman's poetry for years and finally made the plunge. Uses gaps/white spaces/line breaks so well. His humor esp when it comes to god is wonderful/sometimes classical. Sample lines: "The veins in her hands look like jewelry." And:
"Her face
smiling looks like
credit rolling"
"Her face
smiling looks like
credit rolling"
February 22, 2019
A great, if painful first collection - which definitely flags up the greatness to come.
August 7, 2021
Spare, lovely.
March 30, 2024
I found myself saying “damn” at moments
November 9, 2024
I read this in one go, as in I didn't even sit down. Needed this. Jarring and beautiful and violent and tender, highs and lows and exactly what the doctor ordered this week.
January 30, 2025
Memorized most of the poems in this book. Found it at a Salvation Army before ever hearing about Michael Dickman and this is truly my favorite poetry collection ever :3
December 4, 2013
"In her blue-light
cha-cha
afterlife
Are you thirsty?
Yes
I'm thirsty"
I read this collection twice, and as is usually the case with collections of poetry, it was better the second time around for me. Dickman is skilled at examining where life is beautiful, where life is disgusting, and then showing us where the two perhaps overlap. I was reading another user's review here on goodreads, and they were sort of disgusted with this passage:
"Do you think there's a difference
for The Lord
between
slow dancing in the kitchen at night, no music, your arms around my
neck, and later
my face
in your ass?"
I get why those lines are vulgar, but they ask a very interesting question: where is love elegant and refined, and where is it crude and primal? And is one better, more noble, more memorable than the other?
Another perfect example where Dickman overlaps the lovely and the disgusting:
"Poppies in the snow
Blood in the toilet
He wants to take
and be
taken"
Dickman is spot-on here. Drops of blood in the white, white bowl of a toilet are beautiful in a troubling way. This poetry is so complex because of these unsettling juxtapositions. Rather skilled at writing lists into his poems, Dickman gives many words their own line, words that pop like firecrackers on the page, and are evocative and relevant to the poems overarching intent. I'm kind of swooning over Dickman's style, and I'm excited to read more of his work!
cha-cha
afterlife
Are you thirsty?
Yes
I'm thirsty"
I read this collection twice, and as is usually the case with collections of poetry, it was better the second time around for me. Dickman is skilled at examining where life is beautiful, where life is disgusting, and then showing us where the two perhaps overlap. I was reading another user's review here on goodreads, and they were sort of disgusted with this passage:
"Do you think there's a difference
for The Lord
between
slow dancing in the kitchen at night, no music, your arms around my
neck, and later
my face
in your ass?"
I get why those lines are vulgar, but they ask a very interesting question: where is love elegant and refined, and where is it crude and primal? And is one better, more noble, more memorable than the other?
Another perfect example where Dickman overlaps the lovely and the disgusting:
"Poppies in the snow
Blood in the toilet
He wants to take
and be
taken"
Dickman is spot-on here. Drops of blood in the white, white bowl of a toilet are beautiful in a troubling way. This poetry is so complex because of these unsettling juxtapositions. Rather skilled at writing lists into his poems, Dickman gives many words their own line, words that pop like firecrackers on the page, and are evocative and relevant to the poems overarching intent. I'm kind of swooning over Dickman's style, and I'm excited to read more of his work!
May 11, 2009
This is another case of pulling a book off the new release wall at the PL just because, but with the added filter of this time pulling something from Copper Canyon, because I've found that I usually really like their stuff-- it's out there to my pedestrian little mind, but not so far out there that I can't make out anything of substance. And this book, for all its spareness (few words on a line, and about as few per page) fits the description. The poems are mostly satisfying, weird little laments; most are concerned with reflecting a kind of nostalgic back light on the circumstances of Dickman's growing up/ young adulthood. There's a judegementally elegaic quality, if that's not too pejorative a term, a conscious effort to sift and weigh up the factors that made him who he is, and its a testament to something in the poems that you can as a reader follow the way this comes out.
It's not a perfect book, for all some of it is really appealing-- there are times that I feel like it's a little too willfully difficult, that it hypes its own misery at times for effect or to be weird or cool. But that said, it remains one of those books that I enjoyed reading and would read again if I had the chance.
It's not a perfect book, for all some of it is really appealing-- there are times that I feel like it's a little too willfully difficult, that it hypes its own misery at times for effect or to be weird or cool. But that said, it remains one of those books that I enjoyed reading and would read again if I had the chance.
July 30, 2011
Michael Dickman's world in The End of the West is bleak, a little scary, and pragmatically beautiful. In this world sex is the violence of butchery and fists; twelve year olds shoot heroin unless they're afraid of needles, sons hit their mothers for burning pancakes, and "Still/there is a lot to pray to/on earth." I was first entranced by "My Autopsy" in The New Yorker, where Dickman explores the interconnectedness of all in a way that is funny and dark--despite the premise, that "There is a way/if we want/into everything"--this is no dippy sentimental poem. ("There is a way/if we want/to stay, to leave/Both/My lungs are made out of smoke ash sunlight air/Particles of skin...Breathe in/Breathe out.) Dickman's language is spare, and the empty spaces can fill up a poem quickly; one gets the feeling that the poems are written by someone who deeply loves language but never felt indulged in that love: He therefore must paint giant canvases with only a few choice words. At times, though, the poems feel intentionally obscure, and the opacity feels more a ploy than poetry. Maybe this is because I feel sucked into Dickman's world enough that I want to know the "yous" that go unnamed; I want to understand those fucked up brains.
August 3, 2014
Dickman skillfully uses blank space and sparse lines to convey meaning in ways that aren't overburdened with language. These are dark poems, but not without humor and heart. There are lines such as these from one of the first poems, "Scary Parents":
Ian broke his mother's nose because she burned the pancakes
She left hypodermics
between the couch cushions
for us to sit on
That tell you, in four short lines, all about the horrors of drug addiction, the affect it has on family, friendship. How heroin can take even the mundane tasks of every day life, such as making breakfast, and make them surreal.
There are glimmers of hope, moments of connection even within the alcoholism of a grandparent, the heartbreaking scenes of 12 year old children shooting up between their toes. Take for example this lovely snippet from the poem "Late Meditation":
The yellow crocus just outside the front door is not a miracle of light
But pretty close
in its papery
stillness
Simple lines that promise the miraculous in the ordinary, beauty in the small and simple.
Good stuff. Well worth the read.
Ian broke his mother's nose because she burned the pancakes
She left hypodermics
between the couch cushions
for us to sit on
That tell you, in four short lines, all about the horrors of drug addiction, the affect it has on family, friendship. How heroin can take even the mundane tasks of every day life, such as making breakfast, and make them surreal.
There are glimmers of hope, moments of connection even within the alcoholism of a grandparent, the heartbreaking scenes of 12 year old children shooting up between their toes. Take for example this lovely snippet from the poem "Late Meditation":
The yellow crocus just outside the front door is not a miracle of light
But pretty close
in its papery
stillness
Simple lines that promise the miraculous in the ordinary, beauty in the small and simple.
Good stuff. Well worth the read.
August 19, 2015
"The End of the West" by Michael Dickman is fugue-like and highly lyric, but can be frustrating in its seemingly personal mythology and highly allusive overlap. The style is haunting, which brief lines and surprising shifts in tone dome in just a few words, but the poems are so technically similar at points they almost start to blend together. This means that Dickman's work here is highly cohesive but with some lost of distinctiveness I individual poems. Some people may be frustrated by this, but the poems work on their own. I suggest reading this slowly and returning to it between reading other things to so that the similarity between poems in form does not distract from the individual power.
February 12, 2011
Parts of these poems leapt out and stunned me, especially "the End of the West". And the poems do seem impressively distinctive to the poet: the syntax, the look of them, the series of turns they take, and strange little exclamations peppered in all felt new. However, outside some amazing images and juxtapositions, and maybe two complete poems, the success of the work seems predicated on violence and accounts of youthful drug use. That seems like an easy move, though a hard life.
I look forward to other work from Michael Dickman.
I look forward to other work from Michael Dickman.
September 21, 2011
Some great juxtaposition work. An eye for the scary landing. But mostly that. Then there's the god-awful title poem, and all throughout an awkward crutch on childhood friends shooting up, blazons too of the worst:
"Do you think there's a difference
for the Lord
between
slow dancing in the kitchen at night, no music, your arms around my
neck, and later
my face
in your ass?"
From Franz Wright's blurb: "To me, he is one of the younger American poets who are hiddenly heralding the end of the randomness, the glib irony Rilke strenuously warned against...."
No.
"Do you think there's a difference
for the Lord
between
slow dancing in the kitchen at night, no music, your arms around my
neck, and later
my face
in your ass?"
From Franz Wright's blurb: "To me, he is one of the younger American poets who are hiddenly heralding the end of the randomness, the glib irony Rilke strenuously warned against...."
No.
July 29, 2012
it was a weird read, as some of the poems, especially the parts heavy handed with heroin references, as well as with some of the ghost parts, seemed sophmorish. but the opening poem about making a list of the things one can burn, that stuck with me the whole time, and i continually referenced that attitude towards the work when a phrase or stanza seemed weak, which lifted up the work quite a bit. i don't really get all the love dickman got for this, but i got some of it, so that's cool and stuff whatever peace out.
March 22, 2015
Some of Dickman's poems are fantastic--they place things by each other that I've never seen other poems do, e.g. God and Jesus in a sleazy diner, a grandmother in a 1930s-style silver screen Hollywood afterlife. Many of Dickman's poems have a sort of cynicism to them that makes for a nice change from traditional languorous-sounding poetry. Some of his poems, however, lean towards the vulgar and the familiar--and this is why I'd only give him three stars--because mixed in with work that is astounding is work that is disappointing.
August 4, 2016
Very beautiful. My copy was suggested and loaned to me by a friend and I am very glad she did. I am not generally fond of biographical writing; I don't like to do research beyond the page. Dickman does not demand that of me. He writes truly lovely poetry that I can only assume is about his childhood and his life that achieves great meaning and eloquence without reflecting back upon him as a person.
I am not particularly poetry literate but I would suggest this to anyone who is looking for some contemporary american poetry to read
I am not particularly poetry literate but I would suggest this to anyone who is looking for some contemporary american poetry to read
Displaying 1 - 30 of 61 reviews