THE LILY WILL
Oblique, intelligent, and sad, The Lily Will introduces readers to a voice beautifully sustained through compressed lyrics and long, meticulous sequences. The geography of this book is one of thistles and ice, love flashed with fear, and frail bodies seeking safety in heavy weather. In its warped miniatures (here an eye, there a red leaf, seen distended through iced glass) there is a commitment to smallness, vulnerability marked by precision, and intimations, too, of the eternal: “What is earthly?/ Any impulse to paradise.”
Selected Praise and Reviews
* Virginia Konchan reviews The Lily Will in Barn Owl Review
“Melissa Dickey’s The Lily Will, an unassuming book “bound in a square and barely larger than your hand” assumes a large answer to a profound question: “What is earthly? Any impulse to paradise.” Fragility, mundanity, and a focus towards minimalism define and permeate each of these poems as they struggle to break into something grander, more ethereal, more paradisiacal. Dickey focuses on quiet places, or moods, in the hope that such effort may explode such simple vistas into comprehensive understanding. This transcendent desire from the mundane may also manifest itself in a desperate light at times, as if Dickey demands or begs significance from her environment’s subtleties: “I wish I was so mystical as to be moved/ by you, behind me, singing.// No, the factual reaction is not free/ of desire. When I look at hills/ I expect ruins…This is the hour of lust…When you share a bed you find/ other ways of hiding.” — Benjamin Baumbach, Little Village Mag
