The Mercy Seat: Collected & New Poems, 1967-2000 - Hardcover

Dubie, Norman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1556591551 ISBN 13: 9781556591556

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2001

Synopsis

"If Joseph Stalin feared poets, so should you"—Norman Dubie

Copper Canyon Press is thrilled to present Norman Dubie's first collection in over a decade. Dubie is not simply a poet's poet, he is a reader's poet. His poems draw upon and recast the world's great tales, and salvages from the backwaters of human history moments of redemptive, imaginative beauty. The Mercy Seat collects new poems together with work from all of his seventeen previous, out-of-print books, and presents a major body of work.

Previous praise:

"One of the most powerful and influential American poets-Dubie is perhaps best known for his dramatic monologues, the urgent personal histories of personages from the past-artists, writers, thinkers, and musicians. The famous speakers and renowned figures who appear-Ovid, Chekhov, Beethoven, Klee, Coleridge, Virginia Woolf, Ibsen and others-are, for Dubie, important exemplars of new ways of seeing, of new modes of perception. These poems have a fierce clarity and disarming ease; they are detailed and compassionate, personal yet universal."—Washington Post Book World

"The reader new to Mr. Dubie's work is likely to be struck first by the vigor of his forms and the bravery of his language.";-The New York Times Book Review

"A critic wrote, 'If Marc Chagall were an X-rated poet, he'd be Norman Dubie.'"-Norman Dubie

Norman Dubie is a Regents' professor at Arizona State University. He has been the poetry editor for The Iowa Review and the director of the graduate poetry workshop at the University of Iowa. His award-winning poetry includes The Clouds of Magellan, The Horsehair Sofa, Alehouse Sonnets, Groom Falconer and more. He lives with his wife and daughter in Tempe, Arizona.

The Friary at Blossom, Prologue & Instructions

The pond-lilies are like little executions
over the water, the flat physical collars
of aristocrats and the cords that lunge
for the bottom. The yellow perch circling
the impeccable underneath of farewell, government
and mud in April.

The image of a horse diving into water
ignores the wild dogs up on the cliff,
their failur

About this title

About the Author

Norman Dubie, author of twenty books of poetry, is a Regents' professor at Arizona State University. A practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism whose work has been translated into thirty languages, Dubie received the PEN Center USA Literary Award for The Mercy Seat: Collected and New Poems.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Widow of the Beast of Ingolstadt

A fork in the garden, the widow digging

Behind her elms

Lives like a mouse with the esteem of a few flowers.

She watches at dusk

While the indigo bunting, out of its cage,

Walks through a plague of snails

That is still smoldering. The gardener

Killed them with gasoline and a long trench, it was

Lye the last time. She thought

Of Pastor Bonhoeffer, who plotted

Against Hitler, and the other prisoners

In the canvas truck

That burned wood, the chuff-chuff

Of steam up the late winter road

From Buchenwald to Flossenbürg-all of

Them hanged in the morning, in the background

The white outbursts of an acetylene torch

Up in the eaves of the S.S. barracks . . .

The widow last night was reading

The third testament, just a row of birches

Swaying in the breeze, and she felt aged-

Then, in all of a moment, she knew

Her husband's watch had just stopped in his grave.

About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1556591551
• ISBN 13: 9781556591556
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 540