Norman Dubie Books

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.

"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

The fantastic imagination of Norman Dobie is given free reign in this magnificent collection of aphorisms and philosophical observations. Dubie's poetic vision approaches the mystical realm for the first time in this book and shows definitively that Dubie's talent flows both broad and deep.

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.

"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.