Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems

Jim Carroll's poetry has appeared sporadically over the years in small, relatively difficult-to-locate collections ("Living At the Movies", "The Book of Nods"), so I was relieved to find this on the shelf. His work is an odd kind of majesty, a masterful coagulation of the early decadents, the modernists, the beats, stellar figures like Rimbaud and Baudelaire, yet with a voice all his own. He gracefully charts the map from humorous to solemn, sacred to profane, personal to universal without skipping a beat. He is a magician of images, and in the tradition of his predecessors weds seamlessly the most disconnected visions: "The ambulance passes/we sit up/pinned eyes of nuns that genuflect between stars/ambassadors on marble staircases in steam tropics..."Midnight" pg. 80). After having read "The Basketball Diaries" I feared that Carroll's poetry would be bitching and whining over his checkered and painful past, but nothing could be further from the truth. He seems to take the attitude of a grateful warrior to his time spent shooting dope, losing the friends he pays homage to without self pity: ("Some detectives in worn suits slide at my door/They told me Eddie was dead on Lexington and 103/stabbed in the jugular at mid-day/outside two automated hospital doors/He often walked East Harlem after dark, high on reds, calling out the black man/And I salute you, my brother. "New York City Variations" pg. 183). Most of Carroll's poetry, though, is the product of his own imagination and only refers to his youth when necessary. He is obviously aware, though, of the parallels drawn between his and the chaotic life of Arthur Rimbaud with his enchanting prose pieces like "Rimbaud Goes To the Dentist". For all that he is not capitalizing on the success of "Basketball": you know just from reading the first few ("The Blue Pill", "The Distances") poems that Carroll would have become famous just by virtue of his talent and not his sordid autobiography. This is a must for those who love raw, genuine poetry.

this book is incredible. "to the secret poets of kansas" is by far one of the most wonderful poemsi have ever read. i encourage anyone who is looking for poetry to read and savor these poems, they are certainly worth it.

Jim Carroll is by far one of my favorite poets. He sees so much deeper than most people. The words and even fonts he uses sucks you in and you feel as though you have been transported to another world. I first got interested in his poetry when I saw "The Basketball Diaries" with Leonardo DiCaprio, and the poetry made the movie even more powerful than it already was. I left the theatre stunned. I then went to a reading of Carroll's poetry at Seton Hall University, and was fortunate enough to meet him. He is an amazing guy. The poems are deep and their power and emotion pervade your body so that you can never forget them. People think that becuse Carroll writes modern poetry, that his poems are trash. That is certainly the opposite of what they are, and I think that his poems are more interesting than poets who write the lovey-dovey, rhyming type stuff. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to be swept away in the urban-like poetry of today.

This book is a must have for teenagers. Jim Carrol describes the pain and suffering that he has gone through very beautifully. He is able to compute messages throughout his poems. What makes it even better is that you know that he has been through all of that past with drugs, and he has come back as a improved person. His poems show this.

Jim Carroll is the best poet in the world. I am completely in love with this dude. He rocks the charts.