DRAGONS
Melissa Dickey’s rending and sparely lyric second collection, Dragons, moves in five exacting suites. Or should we call them acts? These long poems are cobbled between self and selves, in the fleshed halo of space that separates even the closest kin: cousin and cousin, mother and child, husband and wife. The speaker, though often an actor in someone else’s scene, moves keenly aware of the agency in devotion, on which the rest depends: “I did what they said: Hold your baby. Give her a kiss. I did what they said I did what they said I did.” Dickey shows us life in flickers, and the beauty and terror of these poems stream by in potent, portentous moments: “He says I should be worried/ about the dragons in the White House./ He says I should be worried/for my children./ Don’t you love that baby more than anything else in the world?/ I said: There are good dragons and bad dragons.”
Selected Praise and Reviews
* Kelsi Vanada reviews Dragons for Entropy
* Review of Dragons in Maudlin House
* Review of Dragons in The Adirondack Review
“Wonderfully small and charming, Dickey’s poems articulate moments over longer, extended narratives, from the short lyric poem to the lyric fragment accumulating into sequences, and her sequences move delicately from moment to moment, point to point. . . . There is such a physicality to her poems; an immediacy and an intimacy and a precision that requires slowness, even a deep attention. Hers is an attentiveness to moments so often passed over, unspoken or otherwise unexplored, for what can’t help but be, at first, an incredibly powerful and foreign space:
“Closed my skirt with a butterfly pin, hung shoes on the clothesline. Lemon tree. Mortar, brick. In the photo, a goat’s teats dangle, bell collar around the neck. Why does pregnancy look so pathetic. And this man, a tree the way he stands. Basil grown from dusty ground. The wall that seems to ripple, bulge. How much am I censored, how much predetermined. What kind of what is hanging, how.” (“Daybook”)” — Rob McLennan
“Dragons encapsulates the potency of modern womanhood, with its fearsome potentiality and its perceived limits, and dances between outside expectations and personal desires:
I did what they said: *Hold your baby. Give her a kiss.* I did what they said I did what they said I did.
Dickey’s narrations teem with doubt, with need, with awareness of the roles that women are supposed to play and with hope that those limits are not binding.
The exquisite yearning in these lines, coupled with their occasional brutality, makes this an emotionally challenging, and always rewarding, collection.” — Michelle Anne Schingler, Foreword
