The Quotations of Bone

Norman Dubie

In his twenty-ninth collection of poems, Norman Dubie returns to a rich, color-soaked vision of the world. Strangeness becomes a parable for compassion, each poem leading the reader to an uncommon way of understanding human capacities. In the futuristic sphere of The Quotations of Bone, the mind wanders meditatively into an imaginative and uncontainable history.

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ISBN: 9781556594830

Format: Paperback

British Petroleum

for Laura and Danny

A pollen link twisting in wind, the weak
purpling of salt urchins
and the sheath of the sea
itself printing certificates—
it is a malady of time
opposing mass, mass
hastening the gull to the horizon.

A line of Chinese characters
orbiting in ink, the minstrel sleep—
the body of Hart Crane washing up
on a white beach in the Yucatan. Peggy Guggenheim
has scrambled eggs with goat cheese
and there were fresh dates in the muffins.

Yet, he leapt into the gulf in blue
pajamas.

Yet, he leapt into the sea. It is
a classical difficulty for a bird reflected
in water, for water
reflected in the sky bisected
by the gull who plunges into the sea.

It isn’t ink
we repeat in…    It isn’t
mollusks whitening beach scree…
it’s the city, it’s night ark
gone alphabet with quarks
     entering the impossibly strange intercessional dark.

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

“The poems in Dubie’s newest collection are deeply oneiric, governed by vigorous leaping energy that brings the intimate into contact with history, and blurs the distinction between what is real because it once happened, and what is real because of the emphatic manner in which it has been felt… Dubie’s uncontested mastery of the lyric poem has, in this collection, broken into strange and revelatory territory.” —Judges’ citation, Griffin Poetry Prize, 2016

Awards

Griffin International Poetry Prize, 2016