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"And so poetry wins a few hearts."
"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

essential
For anyone interested in poetry, not just contemporary poetry, but the history of poetry, this book is absolutely essential.Mercy Seat covers almost the entire span of Dubie's career. For whatever reason his first book, Alehouse Sonnets, is absent from this collection. Despite this the reader is given a very valuable gift.
Dubie speaks with a voice that is both ancient and new. It's as if he has always been here, yet just arrived. Beyond these comments though let the book speak for itself. ... Read more

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A brilliant philosophical tour-de-force
The fantastic imagination of Norman Dobie is givenfree reign in this magnificent collection of aphorisms and philosophical observations. Dubie's poetic vision approaches the mystical realm for the first time in this bookand shows definitively that Dubie's talent flows both broad and deep. ... Read more

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In this sequence of fifty poems, Norman Dubie has conversations with the nineteenth-century British essayist William Hazlitt. Marvin Bell says of this book: "It's not simply that a sizeable portion of Hazlitt's life is also Dubie's, but that Dubie's experience, 153 years later, was imbedded in Hazlitt's. The very manner of these fifty 'sonnets' suggests it: an almost 'innocent' attention to the sacred and profane, and exceptional combination of energy and restraint, a 'purity' owing to Dubie's ability to measure the lives of Hazlitt and himself without extraneous judgments. This is a remarkable sequence--for its amazing historical sense, for its special vocabulary and collections of objects, and finally for its psychological rightness. It is the talent of a secret voice." ... Read more

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Typical Dubie Fare
"Hunter in an Arctic Midnight," Part 8 of "In the Palace of the Sans Souci," "The First Incognito," "Winter Garrison," Part 6 of "Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum," "Desultory Photo with Ocean Prospect", and "Elegy for a Fallen Brother," all organized around those rhetorical strategies to which Norman Dubie so desperately depends, are typical fare and, in their way, fine enough poems.But the bulk of the book strikes me as coming in far below the poet's talents and capabilities.If there is such a thing as overwritten minimalism, this is it.As much as it pains me to say it, Dubie is here showcasing his Iowa Writer's Workshop pedigree - in his pedantic condescension and leftist moralizing, his knack for sentimentalizing: "a fallen marine, just a schoolboy..."Does the word "schoolboy" have any solid contemporary application, I wonder?I don't know.I doubt it.In any case I don't believe in this schoolboy marine, Mr. Dubie, and neither do you.You haven't made him whole.And you are certainly smart enough to know that the best poem in this collection, "The First Incognito," isn't a poem really, but an elegant prose piece installed with line breaks to give the thing the appearance of a poem.

I suggest looking into the early Alehouse Sonnets (out-of-print and disowned by Dubie) and the phenomenal Groom Falconer, which is pretty easy to get your hands on.

vivid poems tap into ancient roots
Dubie's poems are infused with a paganistic energy--vivid, simple, preternaturally alert, free from any psychologistic traces. The volume's cover has a mask from a Roman fresco associated with initiation into the cult of Dionysus staring out wide-eyed. "Lizards with sails are screaming to her while the green spade/opens a whole nursery, a powdered vault of spotted dinosaur eggs/racked with loose hexes of eight,..." (from "The Young Professor of Wyoming Wears a Red-Banded Skin of Snake on the Spirit Finger of Her Right Hand That Shakes...") This could all be some kind of surrealism, except that it's more complex than surrealism. It doesn't just try to net the wayward detritus of dreams, but also to continuously evoke irrational but keenly felt fears, mysteries, and hopes.
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one of the most important books of the 20th century
Norman Dubie's poetry is so extraordinary and perceptive that its influence and value cannot be measured and so it is rather often ignored by poets too insecure or uninformed to recognize their debt. Groom Falconer offers individual poems worth reading again and again, and the entire book is a coherent, cogent work of art.Groom Falconer ... Read more

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This digital document, covering the life and work of Norman (Evans) Dubie, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 1450 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

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This digital document is an article from The Antioch Review, published by Antioch Review, Inc. on January 1, 1994. The length of the article is 3234 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the supplier: Norman Dubie's poetry conveys images which suggest stories but do not resolve into clear meanings, as shown by criticism of three of his books. Horror and beauty abound in 'The Springhouse' and 'Groom Falconer' while 'Radio Sky' has love and tenderness. The images convey experience as raw meaning, leaving a frustrated sense of trying to figure it all out, as if failing a course in calculus.

Citation Details
Title: My dubious calculus. (Norman Dubie) (Poetry Today)
Author: William Slattery
Publication: The Antioch Review (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 1994
Publisher: Antioch Review, Inc.
Volume: v52Issue: n1Page: p132(9)

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