Another Day on Earth (Triquarterly Books) - Softcover

"This book is Timothy Dekin's last will and testament. While the occasion of many of these poems is often sad, the subject Dekin returns to over and over is nothing less than the wonder and beauty of existence. Dekin is a cross between Ben Jonson and Li Po, Krishnamurti and Sir Walter Raleigh. Another Day on Earth is a heartbreaking, funny, unforgettable book, a book that everyone who turns to poetry for renewal, clarity, and pleasure will be helpless not to love." --Alan Shapiro, author of The Dead Alive and Busy

After many years of honing his craft, Timothy Dekin fashioned a thoroughly contemporary style based on the pentameter line and the song forms of the English Renaissance poets. His formal mastery and control of lines are a rarity in modern American poetry. The compelling immediacy of his confessional tone and his range of feeling - from thoughts on mortality and self-worth, struggles with alcoholism, failings of family love, to a Buddhist-like oneness with nature - make for a striking combination. One moment Dekin confronts his unloving father, and in the next, speaks from a peaceful California setting where he is about to learn a lesson in the Zen of fly-fishing. This collection of poems was painstakingly assembled a short time before the author's death. It emerges as a work of unusual emotional and spiritual clarity and beauty.