In the Dreaming: Selected Poems

Strong and sensuous, the poetry of William Dickey offers no excuses for living and loving. Ranging from the comic to the somber, from the tightly squared-away to the wide-sweeping lines of open forms, from the deeply speculative to the deeply physical, from the lyric to the narrative, the poems embrace much of what it means to be human and bridge the space between poet and reader in a contemplative and emotional sharing that is rare, perhaps increasingly rare, even in poetry.Dickey sees the surprising kinships that tie the odd parts of our world together, and reveals them so quietly and naturally, as metaphors direct or implied, that it almost seems everyone talks this way:I have spent the whole day, or is it/twenty years,/building up with you this conclusion,/that totters/over our heads.Nothing distinguishes his poems so much as the luring intimacy of the insistent voice, sure and certain, compelling, and continually fresh. Few poets of our time and language have made art so convincingly from the sounds of conversation.