Philip Dacey published many books of poetry in his lifetime. This posthumous collection of fifty poems is his gift to poets and poetry readers, to his many friends and admirers. How fitting that the title of this book alludes to an act by the poet Walt Whitman, a small act of kindness fronting the large inevitabilities of fate.

A native of St. Louis, Philip Dacey earned master’s degrees from Stanford and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. A Sixties Peace Corps volunteer in Nigeria, he taught at Miles College, Birmingham, Alabama, during the presidency of Dr. Lucius Pitts. From 1970 until his retirement in 2004 he taught at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, On leaves of absence, he lived for six months in Spain with his wife and their two children and later lived in Mexico for  five months with his wife and their three children. Besides making several trips to his ancestral Ireland and one to Vietnam along with various veterans, students, and colleagues, a 1995 Fulbright brought him to Yugoslavia for four months. Upon his retirement in 2004, he moved to Manhattan’s Upper West Side for a post-retirement adventure. With Alixa Doom, his partner since 2001, he lived in the lake district of Minneapolis from 2012 until his death in 2016.

Dacey published two books with Red Dragonfly Press: Vertebrae Rosaries 50 Sonnets (2009), The Ice-Cream Vigils: Last Poems (2016)