Conditional Future Perfect
Poems
by Dan Curley
paperback, 96 pages
2019
Conditional Future Perfect, Dan Curley’s first book of poetry, is richly comic and subtly serious. The forty-eight poems in this volume invite us to share the daily wonders and blunders of family life, the ephemeral feelings and lasting lessons of travel (in Italy, mostly Rome), and to hear a range of elegies and other life stories that take us outside ourselves. In poem after poem, Curley is thoughtful, conversational, and witty. This is accessible poetry of the everyday that nevertheless lifts us to new heights of comprehension, revealing our inevitable follies and essential dignity.
Francesca Bell, author of Bright Stain, writes, "Dan Curley’s poetry collection, Conditional Future Perfect, abounds with deeply reverent irreverence and a rollicking, wry melancholy. With spectacular ease and grace, Curley infuses this book with jazz and Milwaukee, with kitties and barleywine and Sophocles, with carcolepsy and Ovid and 'the ahem / of gravity'. Each poem is finely constructed, lovingly honed, and seems to gaze at the world, despite its plentiful complications and disappointments, with a helpless, amused adoration. I say, come to these poems for their sweetness, their delight, but don’t let sorrow hit you on the way out."
About the Author
Dan Curley grew up loving Greek mythology, which became a gateway drug to Latin, which turned him into a serial classicist. Curley is an associate professor in the Classics Department at Skidmore College. He is the author of Tragedy in Ovid: Theater, Metatheater, and the Transformation of a Genre (Cambridge University Press 2013) and a forthcoming textbook on classical myth in cinema. His interest in poetry has been lifelong. For years he taught and wrote about other people’s poetry, but never gave much thought to writing any himself, his days as a garage-rocker notwithstanding. Things change, and somewhere along the line, like Juvenal, he got tired of being just a listener.
