ABOUT THIS BOOK

This collection of poems emerges as a work of unusual emotional and spiritual clarity and beauty. Before his death Timothy Dekin fashioned a contemporary style based on the pentameter line and the song forms of the English Renaissance poets, and his confessional tone and range of experience from thoughts on mortality and self-worth, struggles with alcoholism, and failings of family love to a Buddhist-like oneness with nature make for a striking combination.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Timothy Dekin taught in writing programs at Loyola University, Northwestern University, and Stanford University. He was the recipient of several Illinois Arts Council grants, and his poems have been published in American Scholar, Southern Review, and Threepenny Review. He was the author of four chapbooks, Occasional Uncles, Winter Fruit, Carnival, and The Errand. He died in 2001.

REVIEWS

"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

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

It Used to Be
The Errand
Aunt Mary
The Plague
Juvenile Hall Teacher
Who Could Ask for Anything More?
Our Lady of Soledad
Holly's First Meeting
Imagine
Occasional Uncles: A Sequence
     1. Journal Entry: May 1
     2. Do We Belong Together?
     3. It Is
     4. Flight
     5. Melancholy
     6. Fragment
     7. Letter Home
     8. Her Answer
     9. Occasional Uncles
    10. Sunday, Visiting Day
Opening Day
Lt. Colonel Dekin,
     Squadron Commander, 1944
White Christmas
The Condolence
Community Hospital
Elegy at Donner Hot Springs
At the Family Plot
King Salmon in the Midwest
Woodmanship
Another Day on Earth