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(More customer reviews)"There's more to this life than we know," Norman Dubie observes in his poem, "A Grandfather's Last Lesson" (p. 103), a theme he has explored in his poetry for more than 34 years. Born in Vermont in 1945, Dubie is a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop. He has been a poet at Arizona State University at least since the 1980s, when I was a student there, and he is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist. Although he has published twenty books of poetry since 1968, he has been curiously silent for the past decade. THE MERCY SEAT includes poems collected from seventeen of Dubie's previous books, and nearly 100 pages of new poetry. This 165-poem collection is divided into Dubie's 1967 to 1990 poetry (pp. 7-298), and his 1991 to 2001 poetry (pp. 299-398).
Dubie has been called a "poet's poet." Although he is not an easy poet, Dubie is one of our country's finest. His poetry is complex and dreamlike, painting a picture of life that is both wretched and blissful. His subjects range from Randall Jarrell (p. 18), Chekhov (p. 87), Thomas Hardy (p. 107), Coleridge (p. 148), Einstein (p. 150), Meister Eckart (p. 194), and Thomas Merton (p. 265), to a "dark cat" stalking fireflies, "sometimes falling/ On her back, sometimes her jaws working/ Very fast" (p. 17). Dubie's poetry is also rich in sensual imagery: "Later, in a dark room, both of us speckled, middle-aged, and soft/ I dragged my mouth like a snail's foot up your leg and body/ To your mouth. We both shivered" (p. 146). For anyone who appreciates poetry at the top of its form, THE MERCY SEAT should not be missed.
G. Merritt
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