Radio Sky: Poems - Hardcover

Dubie is a master of the persona poem--writing as what Emily Dickinson termed "the supposed person." In this, the final volume in a trilogy that includes The Springhouse ( LJ 4/1/86) and Groom Falconer ( LJ 4/1/89), Dubie's subjects are incredibly wide-ranging: a dead Aztec prince, Henry Thoreau, Philip K. Dick. In poems that strum with tension, Dubie shows us the ordinary world: a woman stepping out of her skirt "into a haze of gnats," as well as the other world where a prince's "thumbs,/ Were buried in the floor beneath him/ To keep him from the cleverness of the dead." Dubie's spare, conversational style works best when the spiritual, the otherworldly, seeps over into dailiness, as when a TV station signs off and snow begins "popping like corn in a back room." At times the reader has to work to fill in the gaps between title and subject, but the effort is usually rewarding: poetry in many voices, documenting many times.
- Doris Lynch, Oakland P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.