Norman Dubie has one of the most radical imaginations in American letters. Winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry, The Mercy Seat includes selections from each of Dubie’s 17 previous volumes. Whether illuminating a common laborer or a legendary thinker, Dubie meets his subjects with utter compassion for their humanity and the dignity behind their creative work. Norman Dubie is not simply a poet’s poet: he is a reader’s poet. His poems draw upon and recast the world’s greatest tales, and salvage from the backwaters of human history moments of redemptive, imaginative beauty. A Tibetan Buddhist whose work has been translated into thirty languages, Dubie has compiled a major body of poetry that is at times surprising and magical, at others dark and horrific, yet a poetry that always manages to find its resolution in wonder.
ISBN: 9781556592126
Format: Paperback
Reviews
“One of our premier poets.” —New York Times
“Any new work from Norman Dubie is worth investigating. The Mercy Seat, beautiful and comprehensive, is cause for celebration… This is a book not to be missed.” —Virginia Quarterly Review
“One of the most powerful and influential American poets.” —Washington Post Book World
“With its restoration of so many out-of-print poems and its addition of 21 new works, The Mercy Seat was one of last year’s most significant publications. Dubie’s dramatic poetry seeks to represent our deepest moments of perception, struggle, and revelation. Out of his voice come the voices of multitudes. Yet his achievement and vision are singular.” —American Book Review
“I’m buzzing with energy having read many of these poems.” —David Dodd Lee, from a “Reader Response” card
“Dubie’s poetry… is a brave vision of other worlds where human frailty and strength fuse to create a writing unlike any other in American poetry.” —Bloomsbury Review
“… a substantial and triumphant collection… Dubie’s language has never been more beautiful and insistent.” —Booklist
“The Mercy Seat… through its careful inhabitations and remarkable tenderness, offers the universe: clarified, humanized, enlarged.” —Boston Review
“[Norman Dubie’s] published work has always been distinctly his own, characterized by an unmistakable voice and a nearly inimitable combination of techniques… Copper Canyon’s rich production of [The Mercy Seat] should make us all more vigilant about [Dubie’s] astonishing gift.” —Georgia Review
“Dubie writes with an intimacy that belies the elusive and complex nature of his poems.” —Library Journal
“Norman Dubie’s poems have always been generous and inclusive, capable of containing multiple and conflicting worlds—of memory and the present, of the artistic and the daily.” —Washington Post
“Dubie’s poems are works of great beauty, even when they deal with harsh realities.” —National Poetry Review
“… a collected series of poems that demonstrate a remarkable range of perspectives.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Norman Dubie is a poet of a thousand faces wandering through a hall of mirrors. Each reflection… [is] a complete landscape reflected from a specific point in time.” —Vigilance