Wingbeats After Dark

OUT OF PRINT

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Most of Ray Clark Dickson’s formal energy derives from the brilliant jazz-blown waves of participial phrasing. Over and over again, a prepositional phrase is risen out of stasis by gerund. In the clickety-click ching of his lines, he delivers the adrenalinic music of the century’s explorers who went off for story and returned with poems, then went off again. Dickson’s poems insist that, searched well, the world has many astonishing and sustaining beauties—human, aural, kinetic. And the poems also insist that the inquisitive, fraternal drive toward the next day is probably the world’s most alluring beauty. To open these pages is to begin that drive.