Velocities: New and Selected Poems: 1966-1992 [Paperback]

Poetry is so darn hard to review. At its best it lodges in and lights up neuronal nooks and crannies that were invisibly personal but become, somehow, unexpectedly universal. Very mysterious.

Dobyns manages to capture that 'universality' in his poetry in a manner that repeatedly surprises. Lots of poetry achieves this by rooting itself in the well-known. Dobyns takes a contrary tack. The poetry in this book often seems to concern people or places that you'd hardly expect to have the slightest interest in - certainly not at the level of seemingly narrow focus that he brings to his view of the world. Would you seek out depictions of street scenes in Santiago? on the work of the artist Balthus? the last breaths of a bull in the ring? The very different-ness of these points of view and odd scenarios accentuates the twang of recognition in your heartstring when it is plucked.

This poetry has a distinctive feel to it - gritty and detailed, but languorous in pace. It is an unusual sort of languor, though. It isn't landscaped pastoral; on the contrary the poetry is vigorously 'peopled.' It isn't sleepy, either, a sense of time and movement pervades; but the sense of motion is often an orbital one. Time seems to win, either through timelessness or a seemingly inevitable cycling - recidivists, returning to serve their life sentences.

I'd encourage you to read the "look inside" pages posted here on Amazon to get a flavor of this (although none of the four poems included are among my favorites). The one is not a poem about a street scene in Santiago - it's 'about' the six garbagemen, the chocolate cake, the two matrons and the black dog- and somehow it's about how we all stagger through our days; how pleasures leak into them through unexpected fissures.

Others have commented that Dobyns poetry has a "masculine" feel to it and I will, guardedly, agree - although I can't quite put my finger on the "how" of that bit. It is visceral poetry, for sure, (sometimes literally so as when the body's organs are given voice in selections from "Body Traffic") and it celebrates lusts as much as loss - even the losses that are sown by the lust. Although dark and broody at times, it also relishes the small triumphs against the relentless press of our inadequacies. If its "men's poetry", its certainly not a youth's voice. But it grazes up against the "why" of facing another day, even the why of being a jerk, a fool, a recidivist, with an oddly under-emotional shrug that might seem essentially masculine.

As a collection of poems from seven or eight prior books, "Velocities" swings through a variety of poetic forms and tones. It is a comprehensive representation of the best work of a major American poet.