Title: Differences
Author: Robert Dickerson
Publisher: Xlibris US
ISBN: 1664169350
Pages: 124 pages
Genre: Poetry
Review by: David Allen
Pacific Book Review
Imagine a dream world. You’re in a quiet forest. As you walk you hear the crunch of twigs and leaves beneath your feet. The wind carries the delicious scent of autumn and a distant camp fire. You know you’re dreaming so basically you can see anything you want. A sparrow. A nest of sparrows. Suddenly they take wing. In a glorious team effort, they arc to the sky.
Dream world #2. It is a place called ‘Life.’ Is it a dream world or perhaps it’s real? In any event, you realize you have arrived. This is a very special place, a very special gift. During the precious time you have here, everything that unfolds is wondrous and endlessly fascinating. It is a time beyond compare.
These are the kinds of thoughts you’ll have reading the poems of Robert Dickerson. The poems in Differences are short, impactful, and stir up all kinds of revelations, inspiration, and dreams. The language of the poems is mostly accessible and that is the intent throughout. But Dickerson doesn’t pull any punches and he lets his supremely literate writerly side show. He seasons his delicious word salads with arcane references, teasing the reader with allusions to golden ages and chimeras once triumphant but now gone. But the triumphs of ages gone by and dream vistas once achieved are instantly resurrected in these tiny poems and paragraphs that are intensely evocative and fragrant.
The poems in this spare volume defy classification. The subject matter is diverse but there are recognizable threads throughout: life, time, youth, aging, the eternal city spirit of Manhattan. The voice is that of a man who has lived well, lived fully and reflectively – a man whose generosity and graciousness leads him to share the bounty of his insight and experience with the world at large.
Consider these lines: “your life is to rue. we should really have two / and you’d better be bad when you’re young.”
Or, a very short poem called “Enough:” “Enough of trying to explain things / Let’s have some fun.”
The fun and miracle-mongering don’t stop there. There are multiple choice quizzes about God, arch references to Costco cats, siren calls to a time before social media. If you’re new to poetry, this book will reel you in. If you know poetry, these poems will ring a bell – they are evocative, they are reminiscent, they have graduated from E.E.
