Alehouse Sonnets

In this sequence of fifty poems, Norman Dubie has conversations with the nineteenth-century British essayist William Hazlitt. Marvin Bell says of this book: "It's not simply that a sizeable portion of Hazlitt's life is also Dubie's, but that Dubie's experience, 153 years later, was imbedded in Hazlitt's. The very manner of these fifty 'sonnets' suggests it: an almost 'innocent' attention to the sacred and profane, and exceptional combination of energy and restraint, a 'purity' owing to Dubie's ability to measure the lives of Hazlitt and himself without extraneous judgments. This is a remarkable sequence—for its amazing historical sense, for its special vocabulary and collections of objects, and finally for its psychological rightness. It is the talent of a secret voice."

NORMAN DUBIE was born in Barre, Vermont, in April 1945. His poems have appeared in many magazines, including American Poetry Review, Antaeus, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, Tri-Quarterly, and Field. He has won the Bess Hokin Award of the Modern Poetry Association and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Mr. Dubie won the PEN USA prize for best poetry collection in 2001. He has recently published a book-length futurist work, The Spirit Tablets at Goa Lake, with Blackbird. He lives in Tempe, Arizona, and teaches at Arizona State University.