Mayakovsky's Revolver: Poems
Though Dickman, whose first collection, All-American Poem (2008), received the May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, lives in Portland, Oregon, he belongs to the New York School of Poetry. He is not as completely immersed in the quotidian as Frank O’Hara, and his lines lack O’Hara’s tensile strength, but Dickman’s tone is similar, as is the ambition to evoke but not to capture, and his poems progress at the speed of sensation. Dickman is so committed to his method of digression that all but one poem are similar in length, style, and tone. “The Madness of King George” introduces a second voice, a woman in a bar sitting next to the poet, and the different cadence of speech is astonishing because Dickman’s primary voice is so distinctive. Dickman is a curious hybrid; a sophisticate inclined to pose as a naïf, he cannot escape the grief that threatens to overwhelm this book. --Michael Autrey