Customer Reviews

Common Carnage (Poets, Penguin)

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Stephen Dobyns has a real gift for the free verse line--deceptively conversational in tone, but if you look at a poem closely, you realize just how carefully each line is constructed. What you get is an incredibly readable collection of poems that get through to the reader with just the right tone, and which stand up very well to closer scrutiny (if you're into that sort of thing) and rereading. Dobyns has, I think, a unique understanding of the relationship between the Poet and the Reader.

Dobyns's earlier poetry is great too, but this is a fine book with which to start.

_Common Carnage_ is by far one my favorite works of poetry. The poems are written in a plain English that even those who don't like poetry should enjoy reading. Dobyns deals with a variety of interesting topics, including the writing process itself and the nature of art. What seems to concern Dobyns most in this work, however, is how we are all connected to each other through a series of common ideas and events. The book culminates with the incredible poem "Crimson Invitation," which asks why anyone would want to end his life, because even the most mundane aspects of our lives make them worth living. Incredible stuff for poetry lovers and even those who don't read poetry. Highly recommended.

Having read Dobyns' essays on poetry in Best Words, Best Order, I was curious to read his work. Three years later, I just got around to it. If you believe his aesthetic, that poems create themselves and put the conscious and unconscious in one room and let them duke it out, Dobyns is not your man. He speaks against "earnestness" and likes nothing more than a poem that uses humor to blunt seriousness and throw readers off kilter. At the same time, Dobyns believes a poem should be beholden to no one, that poetry cannot, must not, "play nice." Those two perspectives do not always meld well. It is tough to be sincerely hard-hitting without earnestness AND evoke a chuckle or two along the way. In one poem in this collection, "Artistic Matters," Dobyns means to locate a scary monster in each of us. "There is nothing he loves," he tells us, and blames the monster for murder and mayhem. Yet Dobyn's monster seems well under control--not just in Dobyn's witty and neatly even lines--but in the "artistic matters" that he wears like so many layers of silk. I've come to the conclusion that it may be unfair to judge Dobyns by his impossible and theoretical standards. The poems WERE nice--clever and gently revelatory--and that may be enough--but this collection left me wishing he weren't periodically compelled to trot phony monsters out.

Cemetery Nights is an important and influential book of poems but in no way will Carnage be this, there is a boring artificiality to much of this work and a lack of engagement with anything resembling that which I would call important. Doyns strength for years was his tenacious psycholical insight. His poems were microcosms of emotional conflict and imaginary moves. But that is the main problem with this book. Where is the imagination? What do these poems offer me, ask of me, give to me, say to me that isn't obvious, at times even dull.