Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides
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Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides by Stephen Dobyns
In Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides, we see the world through the melancholic eyes of Heart - blood-pumping organ, lover, poet and sceptical philosopher of the everyday. Heart reflects on the vagaries of love, the cruelties of time, on 'whether he is masculine enough', and on 'how some folks get pearls, others pebbles'. Dividing the Heart poems is the long Oh, Immobility, Death's Vast Associate, a jazzy disquisition on human isolation and inaction in the midst of a planet full of people brooding over similar concerns. With his characteristic black humour, maniacal imagination, and in straightforward language that rollercoasters in tone but with a mythic undertow, Stephen Dobyns has written a cycle of medieval morality poems for a new dark age.
The immediacy and hardboiled laconicism of a thriller..These poems are repeatedly and subtly concerned with the absurdity which is at the bottom of all epics...how to act heroically - even acceptably - in a fallen world, where life must coexist with the inevitable fact of death...deceptively down-to-earth poems which go to the edge of things and then come back to haunt the real, the literal world. -- Duncan Bush * Poetry Wales *
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 is nothing so much as the Dean Swift of contemporary American poetry. Satirist and absurdist, unsparing chronicler of the body's runaway appetites and the body politic's rampant festerings, a searing moralist camouflaged in a manic style and a flair for the macabre. * Washington Post *
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 is nothing so much as the Dean Swift of contemporary American poetry. Satirist and absurdist, unsparing chronicler of the body's runaway appetites and the body politic's rampant festerings, a searing moralist camouflaged in a manic style and a flair for the macabre. * Washington Post *
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 | GOR006638944 |
| ISBN 13 | 9781852245252 |
| ISBN 10 | 1852245255 |
| Title | Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides |
| Author | Stephen Dobyns |
| Condition | Very Good |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Bloodaxe Books Ltd |
| Year published | 2000-03-23 |
| Number of pages | 128 |
| 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 |
