The quotations of bone / Norman Dubie.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dubie, Norman, 1945- author.

Standardized Title:

Poems. Selections

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English poetry.

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

117 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Port Townsend, Washington : Copper Canyon Press, [2015]

Summary:

Norman Dubie's distinctive voice and color-saturated imagination have propelled his poetry for more than forty years. His latest collection confronts viciousness in its many forms-the exploitation of Chinese laborers, the splitting of Germany, humankind's headlong ecological disaster-linking the seemingly unconnected and dismissing boundaries that define problems as exclusively personal, social, or historical. Highly lyrical, combining wordplay and startling images with an intuitive, leaping logic, The Quotations of Bone leads readers to an understanding of uncommon compassion and bravery. Wrong Sonnet of the Political Right/Left, Richard Nixon, laughing gas coloring his lips blue with white blotches, is exchanging, in this dream, worn socks with me. He is also passing stacks of gold coins to a mechanical panda who tosses the coins into the skeletal lap of an empress dowager. Nixon muttering governing ain't pretty. Depression-era green glass flying past this Quaker statesman whose brothers are bleeding at the mouth much like the dowager who holds the dripping hide of the panda which she peeled off with an clement of grief and a dull pear knife and her wooden teeth. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 The Fallen Bird of the Fields 7

2 British Petroleum 23

The Postcard Alone 24

The Novel as Manuscript 25

Telegram 27

Deuteronomy 28

Lines for Little Mila 29

The Jerusalem Moniker 30

Wrong Sonnet of the Political Right/Left 31

The Berlin Crisis 32

The Hat Called Sky 33

Joan of Arc 34

The Quotations of Meat 36

The Quotations of Bone 37

3 Winter's Grosse Fuge 41

In a Western Siberian Wood 47

Yamantau Mountain 49

The Conversation 50

The Buddha on the Road 52

A Winter Window 53

In the Age of the Mud-Toad-Leopard 55

At First Sky in April 57

A Song without Words 58

Homage to Sesshu (1420-1506) 60

The Aspirin Papers 61

Under a Tabloid Moon 62

The Butterfly House 64

4 Jericho Radio 69

August Storm before the Hippodrome 72

Butter 73

A Military-Academic Complex 74

Winter Melons 76

The Last Light of a Quantum Plenum 77

The Boat 78

Sif Mons & the Messenger Birth Star 79

Tiflis July 1931 80

Again 82

The Oral Tradition 83

Last Published by Fire on the Pages of Lament 86

At the Tomb of Naiads 87

5 A Fifteenth-Century Bishop in His Lavender Mummy Cloth 91

Shakespeare 92

Gotterdammerung 94

The Mirror 96

In a Matter of Adders 97

Speech of the Paraclete's Mouse 99

The Solar Famine of Hansel and Gretel 101

Ur-Dream 103

For Tranströmer 104

"The Sparrow" 105

The Crop Circle of a Country Parson 107

The First Light of a Quantum Plenum 109.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (page 115).

ISBN:

9781556594830

1556594836

OCLC:

889941206