Review of The DeathBed Playboy by Philip Dacey

This fifth book, poet Philip Dacey makes highlyaccessible poetry from the artifacts of daily life:TV shows, recorded messages, and speeding tickets. But Dacey transmutes the ordinary into the metaphorical and the surreal; dream time and normal time coexist in his poetic universe.

And sophisticated forms like sonnets and couplets tend to alternate with a very readable free verse-Dacey, after all, is the co-editor of Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms (Harper Collins, 1986). In the title poem, an elegy to his father, Dacey brings the old man a girlie magazine"like a priest with a last rite."

The poet's traffic-copbrother works "as brave bullfighters work close to the horns."Florence Nightingale sees a stack of cordwood which, on closer view, "turns into tossed amputated limbs." Readable and fresh, Dacey's poems engage and delight the reader because the poet is always drawn "to metaphor."Highly recommended for all collections.

--Dan Guillory, Library Journal, 1999

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