Dogwatch

by R.S. Gwynn

With his trademark wit, formal dexterity, and polymorphic interest in the world, R.S. Gwynn writes of an America of malapropisms and bad taste and a literary past ripe for recycling. Whether he conjures contractors and insurance agents suffering in a satire of Dante's Inferno, fashions a sonnet taken from TV-listing reductions of Shakespeare, or pays tribute (and more satire) to the living and the dead in a moving set of elegies, his mastery of the old masters and of his art is sincere and irreverent, as he knows the masters too must have been to their readers. Gwynn is a Juvenal for our age, pointing out our follies; yet his demonic, demotic energy has an elegiac timor mortis about it that reminds us nothing is more serious than a joke. In that sense, Gwynn is a poet for everyone, and the guiding spirit in this collection is at once elegiac and wry.

Genres: Poetry

122 pages, Hardcover

First published February 28, 2014

About the author

R.S. Gwynn, known as a "new formalist" poet, received a BA from Davidson College, where he twice won the Vereen Bell Award for Creative Writing, and he earned both an MA and an MFA from the University of Arkansas, where he won the John Gould Fletcher Award for Poetry. Gwynn has also won the Michael Braude Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He is the author of several collections of poetry, including No Word of Farewell: Selected Poems 1970–2000; The Narcissiad (1982), a book-length satirical poem; and The Drive-In (1986), winner of the Breakthrough Award from the University of Missouri Press. Gwynn has taught at Lamar University since 1976. He lives in Beaumont, Texas.

Reviews

[Antonia]

Witty formal poems with a scholarly underpinning.

One of my favorites from this collection: Shakespearean Sonnet

I also really like "Libéeration," a delightful pantoum that begins:

In the bar of the Hotel Ritz
Drinking a glass of Sancerre
Papa Ernesto sits
While throngs of citizens cheer.

Drinking the glass of Sancerre,
He softly mutters "Merde
As if to return the cheer.
They hang on his every word. . . .


The title poem: "Dogwatch"