The Mercy Seat

I’m more than two-thirds through The Mercy Seat, Norman Dubie’s collected & new poems. I was looking forward to reading Dubie more closely, being somewhat familiar with his work beforehand, from stray poems read in magazines and/or anthologies. Perhaps it’s because of my tendency to get deeper and deeper into a writer all at once, however, that I’m somewhat disappointed. Or rather, that Dubie disappoints me.

Reading myriad poems in one mental gulp dilutes their impact, and points out certain stylistic drawbacks that he exhibits, especially in work up through 1990. (I’m not beyond that point yet.) One thing I noticed almost immediately is the annoying tendency he has to end his poems with a final, stand-alone line. I’m not talking about what the line is saying, by itself or in context with each poem as a whole, but Dubie’s laziness in repeatedly opting toward that stylistic decision. (I just randomly opened the book, and counted. Out of twenty-five consecutive poems, eight ended that way; that’s a third.) This is, perhaps, not the most damning of criticisms, but as I digested these poems in large doses, the pattern not only distracted me, but cumulatively, and repeatedly took me out of the work. The Mercy Seat’s poems aren’t noted as being in their original sequence, and instead are grouped according to years; I assume they may be ordered differently than upon first publication. Nevertheless, placing them together in this omnibus edition puts them in a new light, and under cumulative scrutiny this stylistic tic of Dubie’s bothers me. Asked why, I’d say, generally, that I see numerous instances here where that last, lone line could be absorbed by the preceding stanza without diminishing its power, or drastically altering its meaning. In fact, I see only how such absorption would improve the poems, by not drawing attention, again and again, to the last line, as if that were the poem’s, and Dubie’s point.

I do admire the craft of these poems, and Dubie's grasp of voice, even if the voice doesn't waver much, if at all from poem to poem; differentiation, for him, appears to be in the particular details of each persona. One other criticism would be the poems' utter lack of humor. Sure, humor is hard, and maybe Norman isn’t much of a chuckler – at least in print; he could be a hoot-and-a-half at parties. But the dearth of any comedy, even black, made these poems not just "heavy" but heavy.