Praise for Doggerland
“Dicko King’s first poetry collection, Doggerland: Ancestral Poems, depends on a strange parallelism of time past and present, similar to the sedimentary sequences found in rock. But here it also includes all the intricate and intimate bloodlines born and nurtured within its span of 30,000 years. I am grateful to King for giving us this visceral, personalized Irish history—as the bards would—in poetry.”
“Doggerland, Dicko King’s wonderful debut volume, is rich in the history and also prehistory of Ireland, before the ‘indigenous’ Irish, when they were still ‘shallow-rooted,’ migrating. The poems are mysterious, at once fabulous and erudite, telling in their knowledge of the evolution of a nation. But they are also forthright about the unchanging universality of human nature, which will, instinctively in play, still kill “small and grand” beings (‘Berries’). In the taut restraint of these poems, King delivers to us poetry’s grand bargain with philosophy, that truth be delivered by beauty.”
“This is a genuine touch of Ireland from every side with the poet as historian, storyteller, and wit at its epicenter.”
About the Author
Dicko King was born at the old Carney Hospital in South Boston, and raised in St. Margaret’s parish in Dorchester during the last of the grand and mythical eras presided over by tribes of feral children—when adventures could be had beyond the watchful eyes of a mother or father, and despite strictures and wounds inflicted by priest or nun. Dicko’s poems have appeared out of nowhere, some of them published in Prime Number, Cactus Heart, Portland Review, and Straylight. He is a finalist for The Louise Bogan Award.
The Latest News
Grace Cavalieri of Washington Independent Review of Books features a review of Dicko King’s Doggerland in her list of July 2015 Exemplars. Cavalieri writes, “This is a genuine touch of Ireland from every side with the poet as historian, storyteller, and wit at its epicenter.”