Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum

by Dubie, Norman

• ISBN13: 9781556592133
• ISBN10: 1556592132
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-01-01
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Pr

Summary

The New York Times called Norman Dubie "one of our premier poets," and his new book proves the point. This "broken fantasia" addresses humankind's engagement with spiritual practice. Backdropped by politics and religion, Dubie searches for independent, individual meaning through the lives of eccentric and visionary holy men such as Meister Eckhart, Rumi, the Tibetan Tashi Lama, the mathematician Ramanujan, Michel de Nostradam and the Egyptian recluse, Cyril. "I adore how they are all ignoring us," Dubie writes, "with an absolute genius-like snoring." Norman Dubie, a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, is a Regents' professor at Arizona State University and the author of 18 books of poetry. His work has been translated into 30 languages.

Table of Contents

Confession	3	(4)
PART ONE
Hunter in an Arctic Midnight	7	(2)
A Lost Notebook of Srinivasa Ramanujan	9	(7)
Polio Season in the San Joaquin	16	(2)
Elder Gogol's Pond at Plokhino Skete	18	(3)
In the Palace of the Sans Souci	21	(5)
Wrong Double Sonnet of the Coup d'Etat	26	(2)
For the Original People	28	(2)
Reading Late at Night	30	(1)
The First Incognito	31	(2)
Boatmen on the River Mons	33	(2)
Nightmare with Heat Lightning	35	(1)
The Young Professor from Wyoming Wears a Red-Banded Skin of Snake on the Spirit Finger of Her Right Hand That Shakes...	36	(5)
The Winter Apocalypse of Doctor Caleb Minus	41	(2)
Taos	43	(4)
PART TWO
Shambhala	47	(7)
The Pit	54	(2)
Winter Garrison	56	(2)
The Pasha on the Hill	58	(2)
Blue	60	(1)
Intolerance	61	(3)
Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum	64	(8)
At Corfu	72	(2)
Death by Compass	74	(1)
The Desert Census of Elder Cyril, the Little Hermit of Antioch	75	(8)
The Pendulum	83	(3)
Desultory Photo with Ocean Prospect	86	(2)
Of Art & Memory	88	(5)
PART THREE
The Last Sentence of the Evening	93	(8)
Late in the Three Periods of No Thought	101	(2)
The Mandala Keeper	103	(2)
Dementia	105	(2)
Ars Poetica: A Stone Soup	107	(2)
Elegy for a Fallen Brother, Composed in the First Month of Winter	109	(2)
Afterword to a Quartet: Vision of a Tibetan Master Walking over Snow	111	(3)
The Fish Cipher of Michel de Nostradam	114	(2)
Revelation of a Winter's Night	116	(1)
Ancestral	117	(1)
Riddle	118	(3)
About the Author	121