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"Highly recommended for all collections."
Library Journal
reader comments
Dacey's work never fails to amaze.
San Francisco Review of Books
Dacey achieves more in this one volume of poetry than the average poet
achieves in several volumes. Highly recommended for collections
seeking the best in contemporary poetry.
Choice
To find such accessible complexity is rare in our period.
Tar River Review
We have a true voice that sings in various tones and whose songs
pretend not to be songs at all. The full lines sing off the page
while remaining firmly in touch with the natural speech rhythms.
Adventurous imagination informs the whole.
American Book Review
Dacey is a charmer, a fantasizer, a pyrotechnician in the child's world of adult poetry.
The Fessenden Review
Reading Philip Dacey's The Mystery of Max Schmitt brings to
mind the criteria Barbara Kingsolver used in selecting the 2001 Best
American Short Stories, choosing pieces that told her "something
remarkable," were "beautifully executed," and "nested in truth."
How rare that a book of poetry could meet such criteria, and do
so while adhering to some of the genre's strictest forms.
Poetry International
Exceptional.
Chicago Daily News
An author of witty, affirmative verse, Dacey combines traditional
poetic forms with such elements as wordplay, irony, surreal imagery,
and unusual syntax to convey the significance and value of commonplace
events.
Contemporary Literary Criticism
The motive up Dacey's sleeve that everybody knows best is that of the
good-humored, surreal, and lethal commentator on the current American
scene.
Plainsong
Dacey's poems are as individual as fingerprints.
The Hudson Review
Phil Dacey is master of multiple forms; he speaks through many
characters, male and female; he is wildly imaginative; he is ungodly
prolific. These are characteristics we associate with the finest poets
of the past, and he is one of ours.
Barton Sutter
Dacey's a good story teller, and sheer interest of situation or
character could carry his readers or listeners a long way. But
like all genuine poets, Dacey is more than a story teller: he opens
doors to other awareness, shoots you through the fog of cultural
conditioning and habitual acceptance into insight.
Marion Stewart, Sheboygan Press
Lovers of poetry, of fine turns of language, of amazing knots tied and
untied, will appreciate Dacey's poems. Their strength is in the
voice, the casual, comfortable speaker, whether Whitman, Hopkins,
Gauguin, or the men and women of middle America. The
authenticity, the humor, the intelligence--in verse, free or
chained--you can't ask for more.
Louis McKee, Pembroke Magazine
In The Deathbed Playboy, Philip Dacey continues to do what he's done
for years: keep kicking what passes for contemporary American poetry in
the ass by way of reminding it of its wondrous possibilities, if, as my
grandmother used to say, we would care to be possessed of all our
faculties when we write it.
Bruce Cutler
Dacey transmutes the ordinary into the metaphorical and the surreal;
dream time and normal time coexist in his poetic
universe. Readable and fresh, Dacey's poems engage and
delight. Highly recommended for all collections.
Library Journal
Dacey's sixth book proves that tenure doesn't necessarily destroy one's
sense of humor. He has a knack for tipping the balance between
high and low, the serious and the absurd.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
I'd rather read an uneven book of Philip Dacey's than an even one by
many of his more award-laden contemporaries. Dacey's satiric
brilliance shines throughout The Deathbed Playboy.
William Trowbridge, The Georgia Review
The Whitman suite alone, with its subtlety of tone and its historic
authenticity in bringing alive telling incidents in the great poet's
life, makes The Deathbed Playboy worthwhile.
George Held, One Trick Pony
Dacey's uncompromising and radical voice is a perfect match for Eakins'
uncompromising and radical painting. The Mystery of Max Schmitt is an
extraordinary and splendid salutation.
Denise Duhamel
Hundreds of poets have evoked, addressed, described, argued with,
imitated, and parodied Walt Whitman for well over a century. Few
poets, however, have more frequently, more successfully, and more
imaginatively engaged him than has Dacey.
Ed Folsom, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review
Back in the 1970s, Edward Field and Billy Collins in New York , Russell
Edson in Connecticut , and Philip Dacey in the Midwest were all writing
what I would later call Stand Up Poetry.
Charles Harper Webb
Many outstanding poets whose work does not fall conveniently into a
specific "school" or category flourished in the second half of the
twentieth century. Simply to cite some representative figures--Adrienne
Rich, Stanley Kunitz, William Stafford, Mary Oliver, Lucille Clifton,
James Dickey, Robert Hayden, Mark Strand, A. R. Ammons, Audre Lord,
Charles Simic, Philip Dacey, Billy Collins, Carolyn Forché,
Sharon Olds--is to suggest the vitality of American poetry in these
years.
Oxford Companion to United States History (2001)
Phil Dacey has been working profitably and pleasurefully for years
toward blending literary and artistic biography with lush
lyricism, and toward blending the feel of loose, open possibility
with the infrastructure of traditional forms. This Eakins book is
the apotheosis of that lovely search, and we're all its beneficiaries.
Albert Goldbarth
Dacey's work is land-mined with risks. And brave. Persona
poetry gives up a lot: the self, in the Buddhist sense. We admire
it, particularly when it succeeds in its obsessions and masks as Dacey
does.
Leonard Gontarek, Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts
Dacey's poems manage to be both innocent and experienced at the
same time, Blake notwithstanding. Dacey's tap dance in this
collection is nimble and sprightly--serious yet quirky, fun yet wise.
North American Review
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