The Volcano

"One of our premier poets."—The New York Times
"Dubie's dramatic poetry seeks to represent our deepest moments of perception, struggle, and revelation. Out of his voice come the voices of multitudes. Yet his achievement and vision are singular."—American Book Review
The Boston Review called Norman Dubie's poems "extraordinary," and the evocative poems of The Volcano certainly are: lyrically intense, hallucinatory, worldly, and precise. In a five-word poem, "A New Moon," he laments, "I will not see it." But there is much he does see: DNA ladders, Sasquatch, Pontius Pilot's mealy figs, and "a calliope of turtles / bobbing in the North Atlantic."
Green fruit on a card table.
At the roadside, a small boy
gnawing on corn smiles
with efficient hunger—no one else
is alive for a hundred square miles—
the road ruptured above and below him—
the jaguar smiles back
in a white cap of ash
that is also the night . . .
Norman Dubie founded the MFA program at Arizona State University. He lives in Tempe, Arizona.