Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum

Norman Dubie

Norman Dubie’s poems begin at the first principle: that life is an infinite and ceaseless miracle of motion. The New York Times called Dubie “one of our premier poets,” and this book proves the point. This “broken fantasia” addresses humankind’s engagement with spiritual practice. Backdropped by politics and religion, Dubie searches for independent, individual meaning through the lives of eccentric and visionary holy men such as Eckhart, Rumi, the Tibetan Tashi Lama, the mathematician Ramanujan, Michel de Nostredame, and the Egyptian recluse Cyril. “I adore how they are all ignoring us,” Dubie writes, “with an absolute genius like snoring.”

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ISBN: 9781556592133

Format: Paperback

Riddle

The snow lifts into the beards of sycamores.
Laura says with some nervousness
that the tracks over the snow
are divisible only by their sum and zero.

An owl, leaving its cedar bough, laughs. I laugh.

She breaks a stick, says that a brazen mathematics
of stars in the illustrated night
is signaling its approval to us.

I say, “Oh, really? And which stars are these,
precisely?”

Childlike, with a sigh, she points and whispers,
“That little blue one, in Orion,
just beyond the stomach
of the hunter and his trapezium.
What do you think, how many wars
in our new millennium will reach
their natural conclusions, and blink?”

About the Author

Norman Dubie [1945–2023] is the author of thirty books of poetry, most recently Robert Schumann Is Mad Again. His previous volume, The Quotations of Bone, won the 2016 Griffin International Poetry Prize. His other books of poetry include The Volcano, Insomniac Liar of Topo, Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum, and The Mercy Seat: Collected & New Poems, 1967–2001, all from Copper Canyon Press. His poems have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Narrative, Blackbird, …

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Reviews

“In this book of verse tales and imaginary monologues, Dubie attempts to invent a private language… the result is almost a book of spells or a dream book of our time… the brilliance of his images, insight, and eloquence make this essential.” —Library Journal

“Dubie has spent the past four decades shaping a body of work that is unsurpassed for its fluency, stylistic clarity, and incisive use of personae… The ability to surprise and instruct while remaining wholly accessible, and even moving, is a rare one, but one that Dubie demonstrates again and again. No less impressive is his visual sense… Throughout Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum, Dubie once again shows his empathy and his reach, entering a wide range of different lives and perspectives…” —Antioch Review

“Dubie’s poems are unmatched in their incandescent imaginings, gorgeous language, and fearless tracking of the inexorably turning wheel of existence.” —Booklist

“More than ever before, in Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum, Dubie really, and consistently, displays his mastery of the English language, and his status as an expert on the human soul.” —Johns Hopkins Newsletter

“The voices of Dubie’s monologues are full of astonishing intimacy.” —Washington Post Book World

“The reader new to Mr. Dubie’s work is likely to be struck first by the vigor of his forms and the bravery of his language.” —New York Times

“Norman Dubie has ever been free of the typical apprentice need to imitate. His published work has always been distinctly his own, characterized by an unmistakable voice and a nearly inimitable combination of techniques.” —Georgia Review