Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum

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Summary: vivid poems tap into ancient roots
Review: Dubie's poems are infused with a paganistic energy--vivid, simple, preternaturally alert, free from any psychologistic traces. The volume's cover has a mask from a Roman fresco associated with initiation into the cult of Dionysus staring out wide-eyed. "Lizards with sails are screaming to her while the green spade/opens a whole nursery, a powdered vault of spotted dinosaur eggs/racked with loose hexes of eight,..." (from "The Young Professor of Wyoming Wears a Red-Banded Skin of Snake on the Spirit Finger of Her Right Hand That Shakes...") This could all be some kind of surrealism, except that it's more complex than surrealism. It doesn't just try to net the wayward detritus of dreams, but also to continuously evoke irrational but keenly felt fears, mysteries, and hopes.


Rating:
Summary: Typical Dubie Fare
Review: "Hunter in an Arctic Midnight," Part 8 of "In the Palace of the Sans Souci," "The First Incognito," "Winter Garrison," Part 6 of "Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum," "Desultory Photo with Ocean Prospect", and "Elegy for a Fallen Brother," all organized around those rhetorical strategies to which Norman Dubie so desperately depends, are typical fare and, in their way, fine enough poems. But the bulk of the book strikes me as coming in far below the poet's talents and capabilities. If there is such a thing as overwritten minimalism, this is it. As much as it pains me to say it, Dubie is here showcasing his Iowa Writer's Workshop pedigree - in his pedantic condescension and leftist moralizing, his knack for sentimentalizing: "a fallen marine, just a schoolboy..." Does the word "schoolboy" have any solid contemporary application, I wonder? I don't know. I doubt it. In any case I don't believe in this schoolboy marine, Mr. Dubie, and neither do you. You haven't made him whole. And you are certainly smart enough to know that the best poem in this collection, "The First Incognito," isn't a poem really, but an elegant prose piece installed with line breaks to give the thing the appearance of a poem.

I suggest looking into the early Alehouse Sonnets (out-of-print and disowned by Dubie) and the phenomenal Groom Falconer, which is pretty easy to get your hands on.