The Quotations of Bone

by Norman Dubie

Overview

Winner of the 2016 Griffin International Poetry Prize

"Norman Dubie is one of our premier poets."—The New York Times

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

"Dubie [is] one of the most powerful and influential American poets."—The Washington Post

“The poems in Dubie’s newest collection [The Quotations of Bone] 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. Longtime admirers of Dubie will certainly recognize the familiar mind and spirit able to punch through the surface of experience and into deep psychic quandary with a single revelatory gesture (Did you ever want to give someone // All your money?)-but that tendency is greatly amplified here. One feels the unconscious mind working ceaselessly, even playfully, alongside memory, imparting the poems as if with a strange and consoling living spirit. This makes for a heightened sense of mystery and mortality in poems of private experience. And when such an impulse is aligned with public history—the division of Germany, say, or the acceleration of the planet’s ecological crisis—it is outright haunting. Dubie’s uncontested mastery of the lyric poem has, in this collection, broken into strange and revelatory territory.”—Griffin International Poetry Prize Judges’ Citation

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 Quotation of Bone, the mind wanders meditatively into an imaginative and uncontainable history.

The Quotations of Bone

The meal of bone was a soured milk—
just the heads of giant elk
in a dark circle looking down
on a wooden bowl of soda crackers
and pork. One large knife
resting in the meat
of a woodsman's calloused hand.
He grins at his woman
who is slowly poisoning him
with the stringy resins of morning glory.
A tasteless turpentine with pink pig.
The speeches of bone
are matrimonial in early autumn—
by January there's a froth of blood
at a nostril.
He thinks a long icicle is buried in his ear.
She thinks D. H. Lawrence was a grim buccaneer.
I hate most men. Adore the few named Lou.
One small addendum:
the dead elk are grinning too.

Norman Dubie is a Regents professor at Arizona State University. He lives in Tempe, Arizona.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556594830
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	06/16/2015
Pages:	110
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Norman Dubie: Norman Dubie was born in Barre, Vermont in April 1945. His poems have appeared in many magazines including The American Poetry Review, Bombay Gin, Crazy Horse, Gulf Coast, Narrative, The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Poetry. He has won the Bess Hokin Award of the Modern Poetry Association and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Mercy Seat: Collected and New Poems won the PEN Center USA prize for best poetry collection in 2002. He has published with Blackbird, a book-length futuristic work, The Spirit Tablets at Goa Lake. His most recent collection, The Quotations of Bone, is from Copper Canyon Press. He lives in Tempe, Arizona, and is a teacher at Arizona State University.

Table of Contents

Prologue Speaking in Tongues 3

1 The Fallen Bird of the Fields 7

2 British Petroleum 23

The Postcard Alone 24

The Novel as Manuscript 25

Telegram 27

Deuteronomy 28

Lines for Little Mila 29

The Jerusalem Moniker 30

Wrong Sonnet of the Political Right/Left 31

The Berlin Crisis 32

The Hat Called Sky 33

Joan of Arc 34

The Quotations of Meat 36

The Quotations of Bone 37

3 Winter's Grosse Fuge 41

In a Western Siberian Wood 47

Yamantau Mountain 49

The Conversation 50

The Buddha on the Road 52

A Winter Window 53

In the Age of the Mud-Toad-Leopard 55

At First Sky in April 57

A Song without Words 58

Homage to Sesshu (1420-1506) 60

The Aspirin Papers 61

Under a Tabloid Moon 62

The Butterfly House 64

4 Jericho Radio 69

August Storm before the Hippodrome 72

Butter 73

A Military-Academic Complex 74

Winter Melons 76

The Last Light of a Quantum Plenum 77

The Boat 78

Sif Mons & the Messenger Birth Star 79

Tiflis July 1931 80

Again 82

The Oral Tradition 83

Last Published by Fire on the Pages of Lament 86

At the Tomb of Naiads 87

5 A Fifteenth-Century Bishop in His Lavender Mummy Cloth 91

Shakespeare 92

Gotterdammerung 94

The Mirror 96

In a Matter of Adders 97

Speech of the Paraclete's Mouse 99

The Solar Famine of Hansel and Gretel 101

Ur-Dream 103

For Tranströmer 104

"The Sparrow" 105

The Crop Circle of a Country Parson 107

The First Light of a Quantum Plenum 109

Notes 115

About the Author 117