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Rating: 
Summary: A strong, varied collection
Review: One of the best books of contemporary American poetry I've read. Even if you own the seven books Velocities is drawn from, you'll want to get it just for the 18 new poems, as funny and touching and frightening as anything he's written.Unless you like your poetry especially cooked, you're likely to find poems you (and others - when I read my friends Oatmeal Deluxe they couldn't stop laughing) will love in this varied collection. The poems from Griffon are reminiscent of Wilbur's riddle poems or a funny Hughes. The selections from Heat Death are serious, dark, and moving. The poems on Balthus paintings are surreal and successful hommages. In Black Dog, Red Dog Dobyns expresses deep, considered anger about injustice. In the poems from Cemetery Nights he melds his realism and surrealism into poems like the astonishing How to Like It, in which a conversation with his dog leads a man into an ambiguous epiphany. The poems from Body Traffic are mostly about dissatisfaction; perhaps because they're effective I found these more difficult to like. And finally there are the new poems, which seemed to me like a summation of the concerns and successes of the early work. Occaisonally I found a poem a little pat or slack or overreaching, but the next one always had something to show me, a way to touch me. Read Tenderly or Pastel Dresses or Sloth or Fragments or Streetlight or Noses and you'll want to read the rest of this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Life's Recidivists
Review: Stephen Dobyns is one of my favorite living poets - an eclectic bunch including Dunn, Olds, Ai, Kenney and Lux. This book was the one that introduced me to his work and it is absolutely the best place for you to do the same; all the more so since he just has released the dreadfully lightweight "Porcupine Kisses." Once I decided to write a one-star review of that book, I felt it only proper to post this 5-star counterpoint first. This book is a great place to experience the range and power of his work. Poetry is so darn hard to review. At its best it lodges in and lights up neuronal nooks and crannies that were invisibly personal but become, somehow, unexpectedly universal. Very mysterious. Dobyns manages to capture that 'universality' in his poetry in a manner that repeatedly surprises. Lots of poetry achieves this by rooting itself in the well-known. Dobyns takes a contrary tack. The poetry in this book often seems to concern people or places that you'd hardly expect to have the slightest interest in - certainly not at the level of seemingly narrow focus that he brings to his view of the world. Would you seek out depictions of street scenes in Santiago? on the work of the artist Balthus? the last breaths of a bull in the ring? The very different-ness of these points of view and odd scenarios accentuates the twang of recognition in your heartstring when it is plucked. This poetry has a distinctive feel to it - gritty and detailed, but languorous in pace. It is an unusual sort of languor, though. It isn't landscaped pastoral; on the contrary the poetry is vigorously 'peopled.' It isn't sleepy, either, a sense of time and movement pervades; but the sense of motion is often an orbital one. Time seems to win, either through timelessness or a seemingly inevitable cycling - recidivists, returning to serve their life sentences. I'd encourage you to read the "look inside" pages posted here on Amazon to get a flavor of this (although none of the four poems included are among my favorites). The one is not a poem about a street scene in Santiago - it's 'about' the six garbagemen, the chocolate cake, the two matrons and the black dog- and somehow it's about how we all stagger through our days; how pleasures leak into them through unexpected fissures. Others have commented that Dobyns poetry has a "masculine" feel to it and I will, guardedly, agree - although I can't quite put my finger on the "how" of that bit. It is visceral poetry, for sure, (sometimes literally so as when the body's organs are given voice in selections from "Body Traffic") and it celebrates lusts as much as loss - even the losses that are sown by the lust. Although dark and broody at times, it also relishes the small triumphs against the relentless press of our inadequacies. If its "men's poetry", its certainly not a youth's voice. But it grazes up against the "why" of facing another day, even the why of being a jerk, a fool, a recidivist, with an oddly under-emotional shrug that might seem essentially masculine. As a collection of poems from seven or eight prior books, "Velocities" swings through a variety of poetic forms and tones. It is a comprehensive representation of the best work of a major American poet.
Rating:
Summary: Life's Recidivists
Review: Stephen Dobyns is one of my favorite living poets - an eclectic bunch including Dunn, Olds, Ai, Kenney and Lux. This book was the one that introduced me to his work and it is absolutely the best place for you to do the same; all the more so since he just has released the dreadfully lightweight "Porcupine Kisses." Once I decided to write a one-star review of that book, I felt it only proper to post this 5-star counterpoint first. This book is a great place to experience the range and power of his work. Poetry is so darn hard to review. At its best it lodges in and lights up neuronal nooks and crannies that were invisibly personal but become, somehow, unexpectedly universal. Very mysterious. Dobyns manages to capture that 'universality' in his poetry in a manner that repeatedly surprises. Lots of poetry achieves this by rooting itself in the well-known. Dobyns takes a contrary tack. The poetry in this book often seems to concern people or places that you'd hardly expect to have the slightest interest in - certainly not at the level of seemingly narrow focus that he brings to his view of the world. Would you seek out depictions of street scenes in Santiago? on the work of the artist Balthus? the last breaths of a bull in the ring? The very different-ness of these points of view and odd scenarios accentuates the twang of recognition in your heartstring when it is plucked. This poetry has a distinctive feel to it - gritty and detailed, but languorous in pace. It is an unusual sort of languor, though. It isn't landscaped pastoral; on the contrary the poetry is vigorously 'peopled.' It isn't sleepy, either, a sense of time and movement pervades; but the sense of motion is often an orbital one. Time seems to win, either through timelessness or a seemingly inevitable cycling - recidivists, returning to serve their life sentences. I'd encourage you to read the "look inside" pages posted here on Amazon to get a flavor of this (although none of the four poems included are among my favorites). The one is not a poem about a street scene in Santiago - it's 'about' the six garbagemen, the chocolate cake, the two matrons and the black dog- and somehow it's about how we all stagger through our days; how pleasures leak into them through unexpected fissures. Others have commented that Dobyns poetry has a "masculine" feel to it and I will, guardedly, agree - although I can't quite put my finger on the "how" of that bit. It is visceral poetry, for sure, (sometimes literally so as when the body's organs are given voice in selections from "Body Traffic") and it celebrates lusts as much as loss - even the losses that are sown by the lust. Although dark and broody at times, it also relishes the small triumphs against the relentless press of our inadequacies. If its "men's poetry", its certainly not a youth's voice. But it grazes up against the "why" of facing another day, even the why of being a jerk, a fool, a recidivist, with an oddly under-emotional shrug that might seem essentially masculine. As a collection of poems from seven or eight prior books, "Velocities" swings through a variety of poetic forms and tones. It is a comprehensive representation of the best work of a major American poet.
Rating:
Summary: The Best Poetry Volume I Own
Review: The works these selections are drawn from are out of print. That is a terrible shame, because this collection is stellar. The poems are infused with wisdom, wit, and life. If this were a just world, Dobyns would be heralded as a genius.
Rating:
Summary: Fully readable poems that evoke serious relection
Review: These poems are ones to which the reader will often return, just for the pleasure of reading. In addition, the echo from their reading brings forth worthwhile reflections on the reader's own life and mysteries. Truly wonderful.
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