Common Carnage by Stephen Dobyns
'The bird on the branch was singing of gladness,/ disrupting my dreams with its dreadful screech./ Rushing outside I knocked it from its perch/ with one blow of the garden rake...' Taking a somewhat different tack from Keats in Ode to a Nightingale, Stephen Dobyns addresses the conundrum 'How hard to love the world; we must love the world '. The spiritual intermixed with the bawdy, the courageous with the cowardly, the kindly with the cruel - Common Carnage rejects the decorous and decorative to map the complexity, the common carnage of our lives, as it seeks to understand our nature. Stephen Dobyns is a spinner of dark, extravagant fables of a world we live or may live in. They present a view of what it means to be human which is at once both funny and bleak, compassionate and remorseless. His is a world haunted by regret, driven by desire and need, illuminated by daring make-believe. In his often frightening and sometimes strangely funny poems, Dobyns creates a remarkable bridge between pure entertainment and deep psychological insight.
Arrestingly crisp tales told from a middle distance between fantasy and allegory.. the forms of loss that pervade so many lives are the submerged subject of these powerfully realised poems...The invitation is to see the fantastic as routine, as one does in Kafka. * New York Times. *
Stephen Dobyns teaches in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College, Massachusetts. He has published ten books of poetry. His nineteen novels include Cold Dog Soup, which was made into a film, and ten titles in his Charlie Bradshaw detective series. His most recent works of fiction are a novel, Boy in the Water (1999), and a book of short stories, Eating Naked (2000). His first collection, Concurring Beasts, was the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1971. Black Dog, Red Dog was the winner of the 1984 National Poetry Series competition. Cemetery Nights was chosen for the Poetry Society of America's Melville Cane Award in 1987. He has also published a book of essays on poetry, Best Words, Best Order (St Martin's Press, 1996). Five of his poetry books have been published in Britain by Bloodaxe Books: Cemetery Nights (1991), Velocities: New & Selected Poems (1994), Common Carnage (1998), Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides (2000) and The Porcupine's Kisses (2003).
| SKU | GOR003636156 |
| ISBN 13 | 9781852243906 |
| ISBN 10 | 1852243902 |
| Title | Common Carnage |
| Author | Stephen Dobyns |
| Condition | Very Good |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Bloodaxe Books Ltd |
| Year published | 1997-10-23 |
| Number of pages | 144 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us |
