Customer Reviews

Cemetery Nights (Poets, Penguin)

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This collection of poems that give you the feel of very short short stories from time to time, is a remarkable, respectable piece of work. Stephen Dobyns who's maybe known for his Saratoga crime series and recent successes like "Boy In The Water" or "The Church Of Dead Girls" is two things at one time: a writer of mystery and crime stories ... and a poet. The beautiful, astounding way of Dobyns is how he interconnects those two styles, that give his words not only imaginary power when it comes to good fiction but also deep insight and a very dark touch that makes the hairs on the back of your neck step up and cold water running down your back while the somkey winds of apocalypse and doom caress your face. Cemetery Nights is the evidence for everybody that SD has become a master of these two styles, his vivid imagination and that dark feel his work produces. It is a mature work, a comforting refuge for those of you who seek literary pleasure.

His words are powerful, like ice-cold fingers prying gripholds into your memory so that they will remain there for ever, verbal fingerprints engraved in your mind, like letters hatched in the stone of a grave ... on a gloomey cemetery night. Stroll through hidden paths of darkness, desire, longing, death as well as life and maybe, if the moon shines just right and there are no gray clouds torn in front of the night's only light, you see a reflection of yourself in the smooth surface of a gravestone ... but beware of the dead, they don't pass away erverytime, because in death everything is contrary to life - so death means life and life is death.

An Advice: because this book is unavailable here that does positively not mean that there is no way to lay your hands on it. This book is a literary milestone, something everybody who treasures reading has to leaf through at least once.

These poems are packed with emotion and are able to eerily cut to the heart of many issues of society and humanity (especially those of the human spirit and condition in the modern world) that bear examining. The writing itself is simple yet complex. accessable, yet in many ways riveting... check this one out!