Farewell, My Lovelies

By Diann Blakely

Just as Diann Blakely's title pays homage to the classic crime noir writing of Raymond Chandler, the poems themselves evoke the bright, brassy lights, thick weather, and dark alleys that honeycomb... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1885266839
• ISBN13: 9781885266835
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Story Line Press
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.3" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

A true image master

There's an extraordinary quality to Diann Blakely's poetry that will not escape even the most jaded eye. Simply put, she imagines things with that rarest of skills--a delivery that is both smooth as silk and deafening as a thunder-clap, sometimes within the space of a couple of lines. When was the last time you read a poem three or four times in a row just to catch that range of effects? Significantly, her power only grows with each reading. The South, rock and roll, love in all its guises--take a look at our world through the eyes of a master poet.

Roll Over, Emily Dickinson, and Give Marianne Moore the News

The USA has been blessed with fine distaff poets -- Dickinson, Moore, Levertov, to name three -- but they are precious few, not more than one or two per century. Great poets of any gender are rarer than ivory-billed woodpeckers. What a joy it is to recognize the magnificent talent of Diann Blakely. Her title comes, of course, from Raymond Chandler. Blakely makes, out of what one might think the most unlikely material -- Kurt Cobain, Elvis Presley, Birmingham ballets, old movies, photographs, broken hearts -- the most amazing poetry. Read her poem "Chorale" or her sonnet "The Storm" and tell me Yeats wouldn't have been proud to have written them. Music informs her work to a degree that I'm not sure is precedented in American poetry. Langston Hughes and James Rosamond Johnson come to mind, but Blakely owes them nothing; she "takes it her own way," as bluesman Albert King used to say. Her poetry is not easy but it is transcendent. Blakely is a permanent part of modern (or "post-modern," to use a term she manages to sneak into a poem that remains nonetheless superb) English (the language, not the country) poetry.