Winter's Journey
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
“[Dobyns’ poetry] has a somber, eccentric beauty not quite like anything else around these days.”—The New York Times Book Review
“[Dobyns] blends philosophical musings with daft, deft metaphors and a cheeky vernacular.”—Poetry
Poet and best-selling novelist Stephen Dobyns employs everything from Atlantic seascapes to werewolf dreams to explore issues public and private. By turns tough and tender, Dobyns’ plainspoken poems create and reflect a worldview full of possibilities. He contrasts the quotidian with the exalted, always delivered in a precise, familiar voice. Daily walks become meditations on politics, philosophy, literature, and the larger considerations of existence and being.
Stephen Dobyns is the author of twenty-one books of fiction, including the popular Saratoga crime series, twelve books of poetry, and a collection of nonfiction. Dobyns has worked as a reporter for The Detroit News and has taught at the University of Iowa, Sarah Lawrence College, Warren Wilson College, Syracuse University, and Boston University. He lives in Rhode Island.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dobyns is well known for his mystery novels, and, in poetry circles, for talky, curmudgeonly poems that can be funny, deeply cynical, and heartbreaking at the same time. This 13th volume riffs on current events from the tail-end of George W. Bush's time in office, staring down the hard facts and disasters of the past few years and wondering what a thinking person can do about them. The opening poem wonders about a poet's and citizen's responsibility to speak up during wartime, to say something meaningful; about the poet John Ashbery and his imitators (and, by extension, many caught in the sway of what Dobyns sees as a public discourse of nonsense), Dobyns asks, "is nonmeaning intended to obscure/ language to hide meaning?" In the same poem, he calls Auden "The Great Twitterer," and in the next, explains "the demand-side/ economics of poetry." Elsewhere, after noting how a pop singer's hair was sold on the Internet, Dobyns asks, "why not gather up/ my gray locks and try to make two or three bucks?" One is often tempted to yell "get over it" at Dobyns for these disenchanted columns of verse, but, then, it's hard not to think, often, that he's got a point about all the things he hates.
