The New York Postcard Sonnets
by Philip Dacey

"With an urban anthropologist's sense of the rich hodgepodge that constitutes a culture, and a pilgrim's sense of discovery and wonderment, Philip Dacey delivers his New York City to us in this enormously appealing series of sonnets he calls postcards. As ever, he demonstrates how form can harness the inchoate, discipline the disparate. Dacey collects the city's language, he limns its neighborhoods, and he does so with wit and elan. If eros can be thought of as life-fulness, these poems are erotic."

--Stephen Dunn

"In his valentine to New York City, Philip Dacey cheers us with a sharp eye for the offbeat, like the “Dante-ready lost soul” reading an opera score in the subway. Walking, jogging, the poet eavesdrops on snippets of talk. “You can’t pet fish.” “Sometimes a dog’s not having a good day.” Dacey’s New York, rich in one-liners, lovingly celebrates Juilliard’s recitals as well as many writers: Whitman, Lorca, O’Hara, and Stein. Even Eliot makes an appearance, courtesy of a Manhattan doctor. A gift for the painterly glitters in one sonnet, about snowmelt near Lincoln Center, and in another the spotlight swings to Yiddishkeit when Dacey reports on a “Klezmerfest,” managing to rhyme “putz” with “hats” (a first?). This is a delectable book, by turns ingenuous and seasoned, tender and full of zip. The New York Postcard Sonnets is a joy to read."

--Colette Inez

"Wallace Sevens once deftly placed a glass jar in the woods and by so doing organized the entire state of Tennessee. When the hand of fate sets Phil Dacey down somewhere--often in some unsettling place--he organizes everything about him and then sits there in the middle, glinting with light."

--Ted Kooser

Excerpt:
4.

16.

Review:
Review 1

Philip Dacey is the author of eight previous full-length books of poems, the latest The Mystery of Max Schmitt: Poems on the Life and Work of Thomas Eakins (Turning Point Books, 2004), and a dozen chapbooks, including Three Shades of Green: Poems of Fatherhood (Snark, 2006).

Among his awards are three Pushcart Prizes, a Discovery Award from the New York YM-YWHA's Poetry Center, and many fellowships (Fulbright to Yugoslavia, Woodrow Wilson to Stanford, two from the National Endowment for the Arts, et al.). He has published widely in periodicals and anthologies since 1967. With David Jauss, he co-edited Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms (Harper & Row, 1986).

On the faculty of Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall for 35 years, he moved to Manhattan in 2004.