Technologist and Poet Yitna Firdyiwek says, “Dark Diary is quite an accomplishment, a highly polished piece of work.  I liked and admired the style very much: free verse trapped (a death grip) in a precisely crafted frame of lines and stanzas, a powerful and compelling way to cage the roiling (dark) emotions within.  I hoped for some sort of release at the end, but found none.  The epitome of existential philosophy (Camus, Sartre, Fannon – even, in a weird, unspoken way, the dark of Wilderson’s Afropessimism.) Nothing survives. “My journey will end nowhere / long before it ends somewhere.” In the end, even the landscape dies.  Nothing stands, except perhaps the music, music in a straightjacket, insistently there.”

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The Dark Diary: in 27 refracted moments by Robert Michael Oliver explores the creative impulse and the possibility of personal change. These 27 poems are like images in a montage, different yet connected by a consciousness in pursuit of a new becoming. Each poem stands by itself as a moment of realization, be it about the power of habit, or desire, or love. Yet, each moment resonates with the moments before and after it, creating a single dark diary.

Robert Michael Oliver considers himself a Creativist: poet, theatre artist, novelist, short story writer, playwright, filmmaker, critic, educator, father, husband, gardener, dialogist, administrator, cook. He believes that every day needs to be created anew. That is a goal he fails at every day, but to which he nonetheless aspires.

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