Velocities: New and Selected Poems 1966-1992 [Hardcover]

Stephen Dobyns (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 11, 1994

A collection of poetry by the author of Concurring Beasts and Black Dog, Red Dog draws from the poet's eight published volumes and includes several new poems.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Dobyns is a restless and insistent writer, pounding out such novels as The Wrestler's Cruel Study and the Charlie Bradshaw detective series, all the while composing poetry of corporeal authority. Not to say that Dobyns is only a poet of the body, but a gritty physicality does, in fact, underlie all his poems, whether they're about death, love, hope, or stubborn what-the-hell lust. This volume gathers the best of eight books of poems as well as a selection of new, never-before-published works, and it takes us on a journey into territories both mythical and commonplace. Dobyns can write about Orpheus as convincingly as he can write about shaving, his baby daughter, or a vignette in a topless bar. Just as the title implies, there is a constant sense of motion and speed in Dobyns' poetry, an urgency, a longing for escape or release. He writes about angels and rats, sloth and bravado, the paintings of C{‚}ezanne and Balthus, kisses and cemeteries. If we were to choose one element to describe these poems, it would be water, which can move at many speeds and fill any space. Donna Seaman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

Absence
After The War With The Eskimos
Anger
Beauty
The Belly
Birth Report
Black Dog, Red Dog
Bleeder
The Body Of Romulus
The Body's Curse
The Body's Hope
The Body's Journey
The Body's Strength
The Body's Weight
Bowlers Anonymous
Bravado
The Card Game
Careers
Cemetery Nights
Cemetery Nights 2
Cemetery Nights Iv
Cemetery Nights V
Cezanne And The Love Of Color
Cezanne's Ambition
Cezanne's Doubts
Cezanne's Love Of Poetry
Cezanne's Outrageousness
Clouds
The Commiunity
Confession
Connections
Contingencies
The Conviviality Of Cows
Counterparts
Covetousness
Crossroads
Cuiadores De Autos
Dancing In Vacationland
The Day The World Ends
Dead Baby
The Delicate, Plummeting Bodies
Desire
Envy
Explaining The Nature Of Evidence
Eyelids
Faces
Fatal Kisses
Favorite Iraqi Soldier
Fear
Footstep
Fragments
Freight Cars
Frenchie
From The Invisibles
Funny
The Gardener
Geese
The General And The Tango Singer
General Matthei Drives Home Through Santiago
Getting Up
The Giver Of Gifts
Gluttony
Gotteron Landscape
The Grandfather Poem
The Great Doubters Of History
The Greedy Child
Grief
The Guitar Lesson
The Gun
Hidden Within The Sleeves Of Those Dark Robes
How Could You Ever Be Fine?
How It Was At The End
How To Like It
In A Row
In The Hospital
Inappropriate Gestures
It's Like This
Japanese Girl With Red Table
Katia Reading
Kentucky Derby Day, Belfast, Maine
Leaving The Bar And Low Life At Closing, I Unsuccessfully
Letter Beginning With The First Line Of Your Letter
The Living Room
Long Story
Marsyas, Midas And The Barber
The Men With Long Faces
Mermaid
Morning Song
The Mountain
The Music One Looks Back On
Name-burning
Night Swimmer
The Nihilist
No Map
The Noise The Hairless Make
Noses
Oatmeal Deluxe
Orpheus
Pablo Neruda
The Party
Passing The Word
Pastel Dresses
The Place Between Us
A Place In Maine
Putting It All Away
Querencia
Rain Song
Receivers Of The World's Attention
Red Geraniums
Refusing The Necessary
The Room
Rootless
Roughhousing
Santiago: Five Men In The Street: Number One
Santiago: Five Men In The Street: Number Two
Santiago: Forestal Park
Santiago: In Praise Of Community
Santiago: La Avenida Pedro De Valdivia
Santiago: Market Day In Winter
Seeing Off A Friend
A Separate Time
Separations
Shaving
Short Rides
Silence
Six Poems On Moving
Slipping Away
Sloth
Somewhere It Still Moves
Song For Making The Birds Come
Song Of Four Dancers
Song Of The Drowned Boy
Song Of The Wrong Response
Spiritual Chickens
Spite
Spleen
Spring Rain
The Street
Streetlight
Sweat
Syracuse Nights
Ten Feet Of Rope
Tenderly
Theseus Within The Labyrinth
This Life
To Pull Into Oneself As Into A Locked Room
Tomatoes
Topless
Toting It Up
The Triangular Field
Under The Green Ceiling
Uprising
Vanity
The Velocity Of Cows
Waking
Walls To Put Up, Walls To Take Down
The Way It Goes Or The Proper Use Of Leisure Time
The Ways Of Keys
What You Have Come To Expect
Where We Are
White Pig
The White Skirt
White Thighs
Wind Chimes
The Window
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (January 11, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670830895
• ISBN-13: 978-0670830893
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,298,774 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Life's Recidivists, March 11, 2003

By 

Daryl Anderson (Trumansburg, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Velocities: New and Selected Poems: 1966-1992 (Poets, Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars great and strong, September 23, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Velocities: New and Selected Poems: 1966-1992 (Poets, Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)

Dobyns scatters his words throughout the material and the immaterial in this fine, fine collection. His daughter's fate is pondered while shaving, all the dangers of her life worry him while she plays in the shaving cream. Or he switches to a somewhat darker political awareness, due to his extended stays in Chile. Either way, Dobyns has a great colloquial style that doesn't gyp you on content--you feel like you're reading a letter from a friend, and then a stanza will just jump out at you--and you realize it's a good, good poem.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Key Volume in Your Deserted Island Library, June 30, 2005

By 

John Michael Albert "John-Michael Albert" (Portsmouth NH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Velocities: New and Selected Poems: 1966-1992 (Poets, Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)

What?!? Five reviews on the best, most accesible, neither over-brainy nor dumbed-down poetry being written in America?!? What's that about? No. Really. My first Dobyns was "How to Like It." I've read it aloud in several poetry readings since then. The audience always has my reaction: brainy, funny, classical subject, modern angle -- great poem! Since then, I've found the occasional Dobyns poem in anthologies, or heard others read him and put a big mental red-check by his name. I even was in the audience at an open mike once with the sole intention of listening, and was handed a Dobyns poem and told it was imperative that I read it. As a poet, this is what I want to be; like navigating by the North Star, I'm fairly positive I'll never get there. If you read poetry, you should be reading Dobyns. Start with the poems from his book, Cemetery Nights. From there, your poetry-reading life is pretty well planned out (as is that library you're taking with you to that deserted island).