Michael Dickman’s scrawny, twitchy new poems look undernourished, but they have mean little ambitions.1 Cast in short, clipped lines (with the occasional long line thrown in as ballast), his second collection, Flies, is full of fever dreams of childhood, the haunting presence of his dead older brother, and flies, flies, flies. There are other animals as well:
My feet did not touch the floor
My heart raced
I counted my breath like small white sheep and
pinned my eyes open and stared at the doorAny second now
Any second
now.
It’s hard to write from a child’s point of view without fatally compromising the illusion or seeming cheerfully stupid. Elizabeth Bishop, in “Manners” and “Sestina,” managed it brilliantly by simplifying the perceptions but not the intelligence. Dickman’s child, or man-child, is full of sentimental clichés and false notes (surely “breaths” would have made more sense)—at times the poems read more like cartoon strips. The passage above, where the boy awaits the dead brother’s appearance as a superhero, could have been written in thought balloons.
Dickman represents the third, possibly the fourth, generation of American Surrealism, a style (or perhaps a sect) that has always seemed rather mushheaded in a hardboiled, go-ahead country addicted to facts, facts, facts. With its whiff of anti-religious sentiment, Surrealism may look revolutionary in France or eastern Europe—what better threat to Christians than visions that aren’t Christian? In America, it’s more like middle-class self-indulgence.