Farewell, My Lovelies

Just as Diann Blakely's title pays homage to the classic crime noir writing of Raymond Chandler, the poems themselves evoke the bright, brassy lights, thick weather, and dark alleys that honeycomb human relationships--particularly those of love and lust. This is the poet's long-awaited second collection.

"Farewell, My Lovelies is a brilliant, touching and arresting collection of poems of undeniable, authoritative power. It is dense with a multitude of dramas, as Ms. Blakely's language moves, by fluid passages or sudden splices, from myth to the here-and-now, by way of films, dreams, history, punk-rock delirium, or religious vision."-Anthony Hecht

"'But what chaotic gods / the heart has always worshipped,' Diann Blakely remarks in these startling syllables and rhymes, these ingenious forms. These poems are side-of-the-mouth Chandleresque--but they are also truly lovely, musical and steeped in a farewell eloquence, making transitory but persuasive order of the chaos of the heart."-Carol Muske

"Blakely's noir style has the urbane, anxious glamour of jazz, but there's nothing cool about these fevered poems, which are fueled by intensities of desire, fury and sorrow--what Diann Blakely calls 'the music of...savagely pulsing hearts.' She arrives in Farewell, My Lovelies as a poet of dark and bracing powers.-Mark Doty

Diann Blakely published her first book of poems, Hurricane Walk, in 1992. Her poetry appears regularly in Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Southern Humanities Review, Southern Review, Verse, and Pushcart. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. She lives and writes in Nashville, Tennessee.