Customer Reviews

Velocities: New and Selected Poems: 1966-1992 (Poets, Penguin)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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).

This is a retrospective book of poems by one of the best poets in the United States, Stephen Dobyns. It covers the arc of his work from the mid-60s to the early 90s, and shows his evolution into a truly wonderful poet. Dobyns's work is sardonic, but witty (see Tenderly). A short poem can express everything you need to know about failing relationships (see The Place Between Us). Longer poems are sometimes almost like short novels in their use of narrative. In contrast to the strong emotions expressed in some poems, others are contemplative, evoking a time and place, leaving the reader space to draw his or her own conclusions (see Santiago: Forrestal Park). All readers should get to know the work of this poet. This is a good place to start. See also his newest work WINTER'S JOURNEY (2010).

I bought this book on a whim after a fellow contemporary poet recommended "Bowlers Anonymous" and I can honestly say that Dobyns' "Velocities" ranks as one of my all time favorite books! His poems are wildly creative, wholly original, and taut with fierce imagery. They are also "accessible" while still being intellectually sharp.

What I especially like is how many of his poems--like "To Pull Into Oneself as Into a Locked Room", "Topless", and the before-mentioned "Bowlers Anonymous"--challenge the reader's expectations by elegantly shifting from the profane to the heart-wrenching with their startlingly tender treatments of their very human, very fallible characters.

I just began teaching this book in my college creative writing class and my students are really getting into it! In my opinion, Dobyns is one of the very best contemporary American poets--a man of sharp intellect, great heart, and inspiring wit. As cheesy as this sounds, he is one of those rare authors who makes me want to be a better writer!

I stumbled across Stephen Dobyns on the internet and was blown away by his poem "How to Like it." On a whim, I bought this big volume of his poetry and found it amazing from start to finish. Dobyns is as approachable and funny as any other poet I've ever read, and yet you always leave his poems with something bigger than you might have expected.

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.

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.

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.