DOOLEY, David (Allen)

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Nationality: American. Born: Knoxville, Tennessee, 3 November 1947. Education: University of Tennessee, 1964–67, and in the late 1970s, M.A. in English; Johns Hopkins University, 1967–68, B.A.1968. Career: Since 1982 paralegal, Matthews and Branscomb, San Antonio. Awards: Nicholas Roerich prize, 1988, for The Volcano Inside.

Publications

Poetry

The Volcano Inside. Brownsville, Oregon, Story Line Press, 1988.

The Revenge by Love. Brownsville, Oregon, Story Line Press, 1995.

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David Dooley's extraordinary debut volume, The Volcano Inside, won the inaugural Nicholas Roerich Poetry prize. Published in 1988, it inspired the critic Helen Vendler to declare on National Public Radio that its author was one of the most exciting new poets she had come across in years. Poet-critic Allen Hoey claimed that the poems "… cut out a territory for themselves foreign to most people writing poems today—to say that they are the product of an individual voice would not reduce [Dooley's] accomplishment to a platitude but would belie the multiplicity of voices he has mastered in the volume." This last comment is particularly accurate, for to quote any one segment from The Volcano Inside is to risk overlooking the poet's exuberant versatility:

   So I'd give her the kind of fucking she was meant for
   and afterwards sometimes I'd go to the typewriter buck naked
   and start writing till she bitched about the noise
   though more than once she fell asleep and honked like a flight of geese
   but she'd bitch so I'd open a notebook and while she slept,
   on summer nights the windows open and she lay there naked asleep
   the covers tangled down at her knees till I wouldn't know
   if I were writing with my pen or my cock, I'd use
   whatever tool I needed. There were no answers
   because there were never any questions. If you write,
   You need books and paper and food and cunt and drink and that's it. By daybreak there'd be pages of Olga in the typewriter,
   pages of Olga in the notebook, and squirming in the bed
   she'd be rubbing the yellow muck out of her big cow eyes.

These lines from "How I Wrote It" are part of an older writer's earthy monologue. Part confession, part harangue, the comments are directed at a younger person, presumably an aspiring writer. The speaker's point of view is refreshingly uncomplicated yet avoids the shallow simplicity from which so much current opinion bubbles to the surface. His vision is also essentially compassionate, a key point that may be overlooked as a result of his consistent vulgarity. But careful reading reveals the compassion in his genuine affection for his inspiration-whore-companion and in his love of writing and the things of the common world: "I knew how to live with the grime, you see. / The grime on a tenement is as beautiful as the sunrise."

This writer, and the poet who created him, descends from George Crabbe and Robert Browning and, later, from the American tradition of Frost and Jeffers. Literary schools and theories hold little interest for them, but real life, lived by real people, contains the stuff of poetry. Donald Hall recognized this in the Harvard Book Review when he declared, "David Dooley's poetry is not like anybody else's: It is energetic, often long-lined and propulsive, with a headlong compelling rhythm … Dooley uses justly-observed speech to fix character." In long lines that drive through subjects with the haunting echo of classic blank verse or in clipped, short-lined stanzas, Dooley gives eloquent voice to lovers, parents, and loners and to mind readers, movie makers, joggers, country and western singers, and so many overlooked "others" who make up our world, the people we see when we look in the mirror.

Dooley's second volume, The Revenge By Love (1995), features a compelling eleven-poem sequence about the great American painter Georgia O'Keeffe and her mentor, lover, and eventual husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. In other poems an emotionally devastated Saint-Saëns spends a winter in Egypt, a wealthy gay man chooses a life of hedonism over a political career, a woman's attitudes toward love and marriage are revealed in her relationship with food, and a young writer begins to understand the implications of sleeping with his best friend's girl. This narrative, dramatic verse, exploring the depths of human relationships, is unusually accessible. It satisfies even more with repeated reading:

   Far out in the dark are hills which turn angry red
   when a cloud passes. Oh, but in other lights
   they are pink as flesh. What will tomorrow's first colors be?
   Coral? Peach? Pale yellow? Opalescent blue?
   And then the sun will rise.

—Robert McDowell