The Volcano

Norman Dubie

Norman Dubie is a poet of prodigious imagination whose mercurial poems engage natural and political landscapes in an unstable contemporary world. The poems in this book take a candid look at the limitations of confronting atrocity. Dubie censures human shortcomings with precision and spins them into haunting, revelatory reminders of our capacity to achieve in language. The Boston Review has called Dubie’s poems “extraordinary,” and the evocative poems of The Volcano are lyrically intense, hallucinatory, and worldly. In a five-word poem “A New Moon” he laments “I will not see it.” But there is much he does see: DNA ladders, Sasquatch, Pontius Pilate’s mealy figs, and “a calliope of turtles / bobbing in the North Atlantic.”

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ISBN: 9781556593260

Format: Paperback

South Boston Morning, ’53:

Very pragmatic closets of falling water,
bath and sewer, complex
dwellers eating black bread,
molasses, and stringy beef,
eggs like fat flowers
smack the backs of griddlecakes
and rain is thrown against the window
white and elastic with one blue gull
in a loud commentary.

The sea is dark and choppy.
So far, out on the vellum streets
only taxis.
Three nuns sit on the stone bench
and study the storm without contempt,

without leaping into the arms of it—
though wild brides they may be,
though sea air, in heavy volume,
is pushing the dull gray farms
of New Hampshire
into a long familiar misery—
the Sisters
are their own dark umbrellas, folding
                                                among the winter trees.

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

“Largely narrative, these poems inhabit locales like South Boston or Tibet or Decatur, Illinois, and welcome literary and scientific figures alike. Many poems juxtapose the author’s observations—real or imagined—after tragic events, also real or imagined. The intense and nearly hallucinatory poems make this book both difficult and fascinating.” —Library Journal

“One of the most powerful and influential American poets.” —Washington Post Book World

“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

“Dubie’s dramatic poetry seeks to represent our deepest moments of perception, struggle, and revelation. Out of his voice comes the voice of multitudes. Yet his achievement and vision are singular.” —American Book Review

“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