Hurricane Walk is Diann Blakely's first volume of poetry. Originally published in 1992, it was named one of the ten best verse collections published that year by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. With this collection, Blakely artfully mines the empathic center of each poem, fearlessly crafting an achingly personal portrait of contemporary life and family that is both sweet and razor sharp. "What poetry does best and perhaps does most plaintively," Blakely has said, "is to remind us of the absences and losses of the world we currently suffer and revel in. It is very much the language of intimacy." And this is what her work achieves at its best. Blakley wrings a refined sense of intimacy from her carefully crafted verses, revealing the fragile essence of the female experience and, moreover, of the human condition.
"Blakely is most sure-footed when she animates the inanimate or gives voice to beings other than herself, as in 'Witch,' 'Gauguin in Alaska,' and 'The Gold Bird,' continuing the idea introduced in 'For My Mother' that artifice can be superior to the messiness of life: 'it is my song that trembles gold leaves,' the caged bird tells us in its proud isolation."
Nancy Schoenberger, Verse
"Black Elvis addresses the most potent of the bittersweet mysteries, herein writ right, that animate our condemned kind: family, loyalty, love, religion, memory and love. If there were a short story Hall of Fame, Geoffrey Becker would be installed in its rotunda-on the Jumbotron, in fact, keyboard held aloft in much-deserved triumph."
