From Publishers Weekly
With one eye on "the single door through which we all must exit," poet and novelist Dobyns ( Cemetery Nights ) addresses the body and its parts in discursive, sometimes exhortatory tones, as in "Eyelids," which ends, "This is the world to love. There is no other." In these not especially sensuous poems, direct, forceful images are striking: "her belly a velvet lake beneath / one's hands" in "The Body's Joy"; when the subject of "Desire" is stirred, "fat possibility swaggers into the world like a big spender entering a bar." Dobyns's imposing strengths are revealed in the longer poems where, mining single moments--the fleeting sight of another driver in "Traffic"; a view of senile nuns in a rest home in "Careers"; a daily ritual with his toddler daughter in "Shaving"--he deftly manages complex intellectual progressions with no loss of either immediacy or persuasiveness. A series of sonnets on Cezanne is interspersed, but Dobyns is best at explicating his vision of our bumper-to-bumper move toward death, in which we are at once frustrated and saved by the company of others.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In his seventh book of poems, poet and mystery writer Dobyns explores the body: its burdens and pleasures, its limitations and desires, its inevitable movement toward death. The images are stark and full of humanity, and often humorous as well; toes are "ten stubby noses/ sniffing out danger," the tongue, a "small phallus of the mouth." As in his last poetry volume, Cemetery Nights ( LJ 11/1/86), death is a common theme. In fact these poems are a meditation on middle life, reassessing the past and preparing for an all-too-certain future: "This is the world to love. There is no other." There is a set of other poems here, reflections on the painter Cezanne, that don't quite fit in and detract from the focus, but the "body" poems smart, tingle, and strike home. Recommended.
- Doris Lynch, Oakland P.L., Cal.Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
