Alehouse Sonnets

by Dubie, Norman

• ISBN13: 9780887485046
• ISBN10: 0887485049
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-06-30
• Publisher: Carnegie Mellon Univ Pr
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Summary

In this sequence of fifty poems, Norman Dubie has conversations with the nineteenth-century British essayist William Hazlitt. Marvin Bell says of this book: "It's not simply that a sizeable portion of Hazlitt's life is also Dubie's, but that Dubie's experience, 153 years later, was imbedded in Hazlitt's. The very manner of these fifty 'sonnets' suggests it: an almost 'innocent' attention to the sacred and profane, and exceptional combination of energy and restraint, a 'purity' owing to Dubie's ability to measure the lives of Hazlitt and himself without extraneous judgments. This is a remarkable sequence--for its amazing historical sense, for its special vocabulary and collections of objects, and finally for its psychological rightness. It is the talent of a secret voice."