Praise for Dicko King
“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.”
By Dicko King
Doggerland
$15.00
Dicko King calls this work “an ancestral chronicle,” but it’s bigger than that—something more like a species chronicle. King traces us out of the primordial ooze through our revolutions and migrations, and then, only finally, to his clan and family. This is poetry rising out of the blood and bones.
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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.”