Groom Falconer - Hardcover

Norman Dubie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393026620 ISBN 13: 9780393026627

Publisher: Norton, 1989

Synopsis

Hard cover

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Catastrophe, disease, death and allied states of uncomfortable consciousness --commonly hallucinatory and religious, heightened and extreme--are the subjects of Dubie's characteristically dark and disquieting 14th collection of poems. Populated with "dead fathers," "swollen" infants, "purple rows of charged gladiolas," "a great red cave of muscle" and "a naked Navajo giantess eating a peach," the poems shift rapidly from the horrifying experiences of historical figures such as Georg Trakl, Edgar Allen Poe and Ethel Rosenberg to the fevered sleep of Dubie's wife and his own brushes with fear and disaster. His poetry, vivid, cynical and estranging, can result in hypnotic imagery and unforgettably bizarre stories imbued with individual vision, and Dubie's flat, unobtrusive style works well as a foil in the best poems, giving grotesque dreams and daytime obsessions due gravity. However, some poems strain credibility, making fantastic connections that appear to court absurdity for its own sake.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In the apocalyptic landscape of Dubie's 14th book of poems, obsessive memories (including those of his father, a New England minister) fuse with elegies to artistic martyrs (Margaret Fuller, Trakl, Van Gogh). Dubie's speakers distance themselves from accidents, civil war, storms, and bizarre death ("My husband was washing wet sheets . . ./ When he had his heart attack") with a style so exact that the Hieronymus Bosch-like nightmares being offered are made to resemble the commonplace. Dragons "feeding everywhere," a "scare bird," "Squatting cavemen," and half-nude women--sometimes working girls, sometimes goddesses--suggest "the great stone reliquaries of another time." Plumbing the subconscious like pearl divers, these poems intrigue and horrify, but despite the pain, Dubie listens "to the pure/ God rendering voice of a storm."-- Frank Allen, Allentown Coll., Center Valley, Pa.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Norton
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0393026620
• ISBN 13: 9780393026627
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 61