The Long Conversation
combines David Dooley’s books
The Volcano Inside
and
The Revenge by Love
to create an extended dialogue between past and present, between stories of everyday life and accounts of historical figures, between the demands and delights of art and those of life, culminating in an eleven-poem sequence about the painter Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Lyrical moments flourish within traditional dramatic monologues and a bold and unusual mix of other narrative strategies. The language ranges from vigorous Southern dialect, and even profanity, to a confident and original high style. In
, love is always complicated, the angle of vision is often surprising, and language must be able to cope with every kind of challenge.