Winter's Journey

by Stephen Dobyns

“[Dobyns’ poetry] has a somber, eccentric beauty not quite like anything else around these days.”—The New York Times Book Review

“[Dobyns] blends philosophical musings with daft, deft metaphors and a cheeky vernacular.”—Poetry

Poet and best-selling novelist Stephen Dobyns employs everything from Atlantic seascapes to werewolf dreams to explore issues public and private. By turns tough and tender, Dobyns’ plainspoken poems create and reflect a worldview full of possibilities. He contrasts the quotidian with the exalted, always delivered in a precise, familiar voice. Daily walks become meditations on politics, philosophy, literature, and the larger considerations of existence and being.

Stephen Dobyns is the author of twenty-one books of fiction, including the popular Saratoga crime series, twelve books of poetry, and a collection of nonfiction. Dobyns has worked as a reporter for The Detroit News and has taught at the University of Iowa, Sarah Lawrence College, Warren Wilson College, Syracuse University, and Boston University. He lives in Rhode Island.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2010

About the author

Dobyns was raised in New Jersey, Michigan, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. He was educated at Shimer College, graduated from Wayne State University, and received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1967. He has worked as a reporter for the Detroit News.

He has taught at various academic institutions, including Sarah Lawrence College, the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, the University of Iowa, Syracuse University, and Boston University.

In much of his poetry and some works of non-genre fiction, Dobyns employs extended tropes, using the ridiculous and the absurd as vehicles to introduce more profound meditations on life, love, and art. He shies neither from the low nor from the sublime, and all in a straightforward narrative voice of reason. His journalistic training has strongly informed this voice.

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Based on the poems in this collection (my first exposure to Dobyns), I'd have to describe the poet somewhat paradoxically as an optimistic curmudgeon.

From one of my favorite poems in the book, Rabbits:

.............It's back-
breaking work to keep alive one's feeling of delight
when one has no doubt about the world's constant
acts of ugliness, the greed of small-minded mine,
and the brutatility of time's unbroken progression.
Among my gifts the one I try to encourage most
is a sense of wonder, surely a minor talent and one
that gets a little creaky, but it's a gift that lets me
greet the day with a blend of pleasure and surprise.

Though the politics of some of the poems date them a bit (according to the author, most were written during George W. Bush's administration), at least they're still politics with which I can agree. These poems are as much miniature philosophical essay as the are poetry, so I'm not sure if we have poems making philosophy more digestible or philosophy making the poetry more digestible. Either way, I was happy to have read such thought-provoking--and thoroughly accessible--work.

[Weston · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written narrative poetry, bold in its attempt to meaningfully break from tradition. As the great poet (and Dobyns' friend) Louise Gluck wrote in 1997

Neither Pinsky nor Dobyns has the look on the page of the cutting edge, the experimental: no showy contempt for grammar, no murky lacunae, no cult of illogic. And yet it seems to me that in the richest way this is what they are: they enlarge the definition of the art.

In "Winter's Journey" Dobyns writes essays too distracted and recursive to be essays, poetry too meandering and narrative to be poetry, thoughts too beautiful and well-constructed to be notebook musings. And yet, in this combination they are perfect, hammering home with the image of poetry but with the clear, overt statement of essay. Dobyns is unafraid to say things clearly; he does not hide behind a more obfuscating poetic image but rather sticks his neck out and tells you, These are my thoughts, imperfect and often silly as they are, and they are beautiful and true.

[Christopher · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sort of rambley, matter of fact, story or blog or journal-like pieces that I wasn’t particularly fond of.

Though this line
‘a system of disconnected responsibility’
feels like an apt description of the collection.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This new book is one of the best things out there right now. It's a very moving book, and it evokes the Rhode Island coast in winter in a way that is amazingly cinematic. He is at once political and introspective, and he is emotionally appealing, and also capable of wonderful abruptness. I think that Dobyns is one of the few poets who help me understand the American culture of aggression, and its denial of it, and the relation of these qualities to the rest of the world. There are passages of amazing gracefulness as well. He is an unsettling poet. Reading this book, it occurred to me that a lot of what is out there is popular and even well-regarded because it is comforting to readers in some way that is fundamentally not very challenging, eager to charm, to dazzle with the prestige of knowledge, or just by being plain dull. Dobyns is not comforting in any of these ways, but the effect of this book is oddly consoling to me. To some readers who are poets, his is a daunting and hard to assimilate example. Though plain and clear, Dobyns is profound, and I have a feeling that people will come back and read this book in time, if there are still readers in, say, fifty years.

[Christopher Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is the proper shade of bleak for adults. Most of the poems were started in the winter of 2007 when the United States was “an embarrassment” to those who wince at Donald Trump today. If you were alive and alert at that time you will likely find the poems resonate in half-familiar ways that you might prefer to forget. On the other hand, even if you missed the first four years of the Iraq disaster you could be prepared for Dobyns' book by the financial meltdown in 2008, the Snowden revelations in 2013 and the ongoing misery in Iraq and Syria today.

Life isn't pretty and Dobyns meditates on this fact in his own quirky, eloquent way. He uses simple facts from his daily life – a walk on a beach, a train ride to Washington, an encounter between his dog and a possum – as a launching pad for thoughts about honesty, morality and art. Chekhov is mentioned in two poems, Basho in a third. That should tell you something. If it doesn't then you might want to give the book a pass. For those who choose to pick it up: there is no solace here. But there is beauty.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will stipulate that stephen can be an insufferable prick. That being said, i'm sure he'd agree. Also, that being said, he writes pretty lovely, thoughtful, angry, interrogative poems that i've always enjoyed. I have a soft spot in my heart for old poets writing about being old, and this is one of those. And an excellent example of it. Age and cold and the new england ocean suffuses these poems, and having spent not nearly enough time at the ocean, the heave and rush of the north atlantic soak the words and his thoughts. It's a good book. And a good book for the colding weather.

[Richard Hunt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A spare, insightful and lyrical book. These short pieces are polished down to their essential spirit. Dobyns captures what might be small moments in a day and infuses them with a resonance that lingers.

[Ann Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charming & unexpectedly funny. The perfect read for a winter evening.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

long phillisophical ramblings. great book!

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good Dobyns' kick in the groin of the world -- all beware and were protective gear -- a hockey cup.

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are long poems by Dobyns, and I had to sit with each one for a long while, sorting them out. I spent the most days with “Ducks” which begins:

Warm in my truck by the lighthouse at Watch Hill
on a sunny morning in midwinter, I observe
the ducks bobbing among ice-covered rocks
and think of Bashō and what his position might
have been on the subject of the demand-side
economics of poetry, a term I have just learned,
which argues that the smaller a poet’s number
of readers, the less reason the poet has to write
and why bother if not a single line will stick
in the mind a nanosecond past the poet’s death?

Absurd, philosophical, existential. And even funnier when you consider this long ass poem celebrates the master of the haiku.

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

If poetry is the careful distillation of language to an essence,, then these stream-of-consciousness prosy essays are not really poetry. There is no doubt Stephen Dobyn's can write---given his past poetry collections and the concluding poem in Winter's Journey. But I cannot recommend this collection, given that it feels lax and self indulgent. There are moments: phrases and sentences that ring true or have fine wit about them. Let's just let it go at this: Disappointing.

[Jim Frazee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hardly anyone out there these days writes as well as Dobyns. His poems are often moving, bittersweet, intense meditations on how we move forward in life, through beauty and heartbreak at the same time. While so much poetry today has taken a wrong turn, Dobyns' poems make sense of the complexities of our time, and of how we deal with them.

www.jim-frazee.com

[elise amaryllis · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5
i enjoyed this poetry collection and i get that at times it's trying to not be like "other poetry" but sometimes this makes it seem less like poetry and more like...i dunno...rambly essays or journal entries or just sometimes disjointed collections of thoughts. sometimes this is really interesting to read, and a lot of these rambly thoughts enjoyed, but sometimes it seems like he just really loves hearing his own (literary) voice.

my favorites:
(some of these i liked in their entirety, some i started getting tired of towards the end but enjoyed enough in part to warrant mentioning.)
- napatree point
- ducks
- rhinoceros
- mourning doves
- rabbits
- nickel
- possum
- werewolf
- looking for the dog
- lost
- rhinoceres

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting

These poems are sprawling and prosaic, but Dobyns' subtle humor comes through. There is a joy in the meandering through these verses.

[Richard · Rating 1 out of 5]

I admit in a heartbeat that I wouldn't have been SO disappointed in this collection had it not carried a name like Stephen Dobyns. Without Dobyns' name, I would have pawned this book off as the work of some amateur with more ego and access to a poor poetry handbook than poetic drive. But this is a Dobyns collection, the same man who has written absolute classics like "How to Like It" and "Cemetery Nights," so I am just simply shocked. Surely, a different creature takes us over when we write, for these poems try all too hard to be thoughtful and philosophical, which makes them feel more like trite essays than poems, yet this is a man who has also shot into the stratosphere with his essays on poetry. The poems here come nowhere near the extremes of his writing career. The first handful of poems have a trite set-up of 'I was out walking when I saw this animal and then thought about...' and the insights overall seem sad and cliche, his political points not even meeting that standard. And now it sounds like I'm just being mean, but even the layout of this book is near-unreadable, looking more like poorly set prose than poetry. I will grant any master the occasional slip, but Dobyns' poetry has been little more than a dying lantern in a snowstorm when it used to be a beacon.

[James · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a letdown from such a great poet. Awful. A few decent lines could not buy this rambling mess of blog entries masquerading as poetry a second star. I probably should've quit when he went all Godwin's Law on America in the second poem.

[emma]

this is an example of modern [not] poetry.

[Steve Peacock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed it, but I much prefer Dobyns' more twisted style of his earlier poetry.