When the Ice came and took the sea
it meant everything to me...
About Dicko King
Dicko King was born at Carney Hospital in South Boston; was raised in St. Margaret’s parish in Dorchester during the last of the grand and mythical eras presided over by tribes of feral children — when adventures could be had beyond the watchful eyes of a mother or father, and despite any strictures and wounds inflicted by priest or nun.
He is the son of Mary Alice McCarthy whose people are from Cork and Tipperary. His father is Richard King out of County Mayo and Galway and descended from the legendary physician, Foranan O’Fergus, who slew the Fiend of the Lake. Before returning to Southie at the age of twelve, Dicko relinquished sovereignty over a small band of wild boys whose townland was Edison Green with its imposing and venerated druidic god of an elm tree - the ‘Greenie Tree’. That January, near the barren elm, he presided, for the last time, over the winter ritual of the yule tree bonfire — a magnificent conflagration — a pyramid of flame and pungent smoke rising above the sacred ground of the Green into the Twelfth Night’s sky.
His poems have appeared out of nowhere, some of which have also appeared in Prime Number, Cactus Heart, Portland Review and Straylight.
He is a finalist for The Louise Bogan Award.
He lives with his wife, Treva, in Phoenix.
Doggerland:
Ancestral Poems
Winner of the 2013 Off the Grid Press Poetry Prize, Doggerland: Ancestral Poems is essentially an Irish history, an imagined and mythical family chronicle spanning 30,000 years, from our beginnings in East Africa, through the great migration – thereafter out of western Asia and across Europe to Doggerland, and eventually through Great Britain into Ireland. The book begins in the mud of the Cambrian Sea, and ends with a woman’s migration out of Ireland in the early 20th century.
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Bird Years
Bird Years is a book of false memories and myth — and recollection and revelation excavated out of the King's unconscious, the pieces laid out and puzzled over. It sifts through the shards of a childhood — the remnants carried forward into adulthood as tokens of the past yet they are a heavy weight, poorly distributed, and shouldered such that one is hunched low as we meet ourselves on the road. What is it of the frightened boy stays with us, running parallel to the running man? This is a grand meander through the daunting piecework of making a life.
Antipathy
What it was was slender light, its
shadow on the fen knifing his face to sinister
- to threat, to threatening;
when brother saw brother in a new light.