Quotations of Bone

Norman Dubie's distinctive voice and color-saturated imagination have propelled his poetry for more than forty years. His latest collection confronts viciousness in its many forms-the exploitation of Chinese laborers, the splitting of Germany, humankind's headlong ecological disaster-linking the seemingly unconnected and dismissing boundaries that define problems as exclusively personal, social, or historical. Highly lyrical, combining wordplay and startling images with an intuitive, leaping logic, The Quotations of Bone leads readers to an understanding of uncommon compassion and bravery. Wrong Sonnet of the Political Right/Left, Richard Nixon, laughing gas coloring his lips blue with white blotches, is exchanging, in this dream, worn socks with me. He is also passing stacks of gold coins to a mechanical panda who tosses the coins into the skeletal lap of an empress dowager. Nixon muttering governing ain't pretty. Depression-era green glass flying past this Quaker statesman whose brothers are bleeding at the mouth much like the dowager who holds the dripping hide of the panda which she peeled off with an clement of grief and a dull pear knife and her wooden teeth. Book jacket.