Conditional Future Perfect
Poems
by Dan Curley
with a Foreword by John Cassels
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 and the ephemeral feelings and lasting lessons of travel (in Italy, mostly Rome). It includes 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 heights of comprehension, revealing our inevitable follies and essential dignity.
Reviews
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.
—Francesca Bell, author of Bright Stain and What Small Sound
The speaker of Dan Curley’s delightful, witty poems does not bring home the free rocking chair from the yard sale; when his wife accuses him of getting off on tangents, he explains: “Being born was the tangent. I’ve / Made a life trying to get back / To what I was doing before that.” He remembers shoveling snow with his daughter, recalls a Finnish couple “Who couldn’t get a handle on / The definite article, ever asking / Were we going to The Star Wars?” Curley’s poems notice the water dish his wife bought for “a fantasy dog, / Chocolate lab, part husky,”; they remember “It was beautiful to cross the bridge in silence, / Over houses sunk in the last century’s floods…”
—Faith Shearin, author of Darwin’s Daughter
Often with imperturbably wry smile, Conditional Future Perfect presents a Generation X-er’s montage of whatnot and what happens, but Dan Curley’s wit works as a sleight-of-hand for finding the complementary color that grays down the reds, yellows, and blues of experience. The infectiously chatty speaker of this poetry confronts death and environmental crises that jeopardize existence, scrutinizes the difference between truth and veracity, sympathizes with Roman fountains, finds wonder in the everyday. Curley’s poems speak to a swarm of yous, the abundant addressees that testify to affections, quarrels, barstool conspiracies, and shared journeys.
—James Bradley Wells, author of Bicycle and The Kazantzakis Guide to Greece
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.
