Years Later

by Gregory Djanikian

A collection of poetry by Gregory Djanikian.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2000

About the author

Born in Alexandria, Egypt of Armenian parentage, Gregory Djanikian came to the United States when he was 8 years old and spent his boyhood in Williamsport, PA. He is a graduate of the Syracuse University writing program and is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania where he was an undergraduate. He is the author of six collections of poetry, The Man in the Middle, Falling Deeply into America, About Distance, Years Later, So I Will Till the Ground, and, most recently, Dear Gravity. He has been awarded a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, two prizes from Poetry magazine (the Eunice Tietjens Prize, and Friends of Literature Prize), the Anahid Literary Award from the Armenian Center at Columbia University, and multiple residencies at Yaddo.
His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, Boulevard, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies including Best American Poetry, Good Poems, American Places (Viking), Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem (Knopf), Seriously Funny (Georgia), Becoming Americas: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing (Library of America), Poem in Your Pocket (The Academy of American Poets), Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond (Norton), 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (Random House), among others.

He lives outside of Philadelphia, PA with his wife, artist Alysa Bennett.

Reviews

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to admit to being a bit skeptical about this book before I read it. I saw Poetry magazine in the credits, and I expected another book that made no sense and bored the heck out of me. Turns out I was hooked from the first few lines.

The first poem is called "Something Unusual." A married couple is breaking up when their furnace explodes covering the furniture in soot. Of course, they "first tried to blame it on each other." Before they knew it they felt "why shouldn't it happen." The result is fascinating.

The rest of Part One is like that. It reminded to some degree of that great Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, Danny DeVito movie The War of the Roses. Perhaps not to that extreme though.

A silent couple plays tennis while she drills the ball past her husband.

The wife who asks her husband had he ever loved her.

Someone who yells from a booth, "Where have I put my love?"

A man who'll be at a bar "till morning thinking about it."

The man "who'd like to get a new car,/red and sporty, maybe steal it even-- . . ."

Part 2 ends with the poem "The Man Who was always Sad." That gives the theme of that section.

The weakest was part 3. That's where the Poetry magazine poem was. Figures.