The Awakened Hours: Poems

By Robert Jason Dick and Jason Dick

Book Overview

In "The Awakened Hours," poet Jason Dick takes us on a lyrical journey through four intertwined yet distinctly different emotional and intellectual perspectives: Contemplation, Dreaming Awake,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0595444016
• ISBN13: 9780595444014
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Length: 116 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The Awakened Hours is a very good book!

Robert Jason Dick knows something about poetry that many of today's poets don't. It isn't prose. Its purpose isn't to capture a memory, tell an amusing anecdote or even preach against a a war. Poetry conveys what can't be put into words--love, death, longing, joy--and it does this by using images that encourage the reader to find those things in his or her own life. In "Awakened Hours," Robert Jason Dick is our tour guide on a journey of contemplation, vision, awareness, revelation and passion. These are as important to our soul as food and drink are to our body. I love the book's title which promises heightened reality. The cover photographs mirror this sense of contemplation, excitement and performance in a world of daylight and night. The poet has a knack for great poem titles too: "Hello, Remember Me?' "Dollar-Store Jesus" (one of my favorite pieces), "Don't Let It Kill You; There's More..." and "Carnivorous Curse." He's adept at poems of two, three and four line stanzas. I particularly admire those with two line stanzas because most people do them poorly (rhyming couplets, haiku like aphorisms). Each captures an image but also there is a leap between stanzas that creates an energy prose can't match. Not that some of the poems don't go on a bit after they are really done or reach a little too much ("Lifting broken wing / universal grace spokesman / brings uncorrupt truth."). But the last line of that same poem just quoted, "Eastern Ode to Martin Luther," redeems itself with these wonderful closing words: "Martin Luther. I / rise at your humble strength / kneeling quietly." Wow! My friend who was head of the University of Maryland Creative Writing Program used to say of one poem or other in a workshop, "That's the line worth the whole poem." Well there are many such lines in this book. The dollar-store Jesuses, "Yelling. `I cost nothing / to take home with you!'" The lines of "Christine," "I saw you once through / the window of the cottage / by the sea / where you had moved / away from me," This poem concludes with the wonderful, "If I met you today, it would be different / but time is no accident." I thought "Bond Road" was over the top, and lines like those in "Intertwined" are confounding: "You're tethered to your mother's love; / like a moon you will grow / in her orbit to shine / your own light one day."--a moon, when I last checked, is reflecting light from a sun, not projecting its own. But one more thing I give this poet credit for is that he has a feeling for the world today, which many of the nature poets don't. "Miss Digital World," "Television Hangover," "The Life Cycle of a Modern Family" and others speak to the present. And "Scream," a clever play on Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" gives us a fresh take on this modern generation. Another one of my favorites, "Don't Let It Kill You; There's More..." ends with these magicall lines: "The time will come / to open the box." With "The Awakened Hours" the time has come and Robert Jason Di