The poet and novelist Stephen Dobyns died on June 14, at the age of eighty-five; I’d always admired the way he conducted his career, funding his poetry with a series of detective novels set in Saratoga Springs. In moments when my own poetic vocation seemed a mug’s game, I would think, “Well, I can always write detective fiction, just like Dobyns.” But as enjoyable as the adventures of private investigator Charlie Bradshaw are, it was Dobyns’ poems that made the biggest impression on me, particularly Cemetery Nights, published in 1987 and a book I devoured that year at the age of twenty, when I was just beginning an effort to read living, contemporary poets, even though I didn’t yet understand I would be joining those ranks (I was still trying to write fiction).
Part of the reason the poems in Cemetery Nights spoke so directly to me was for that very reason: they were narrative and fantastical, often beginning with a bold, aphoristic statement (Some people but their trust in art, other/ believe in murder. Each can be in error.) or a not entirely rhetorical question (When are we satisfied or get what we want,/ when do we speak the truth of our feelings?) that the poem would unfold almost as a fable, but in a dry, clear-eyed tone that was irresistible to me, each lengthy, single stanza carried along long-limbed pentameter-busting lines with a confidence and calm that seemed easy. Dobyns rarely breaks up the stanza, so it’s almost as if walking through a spacious gallery while listening to someone tell you something in an urgent whisper, something important, but never raising their voice to get the point across.
The poems wear their dream logic lightly in order to drop their gravitas unexpectedly into the reader’s lap. A man is imprisoned by magic in a black walnut tree only to be carved into a mermaid in a little allegory of art (“The Mermaid”); the last Pony Express rider waits even now for a man to declare his love by letter, though of course the man doesn’t (“Pony Express”); God retires to “a little brick cottage/ in the vicinity of Venus” where he laments with his buddy the Devil that really he should have just stuck to gardening (“The Gardener”); in the title poem, the dead rise and insist on doing all the things they did when they were alive, even though their rotting bodies are falling apart. A wry melancholy coats everyone in these poems, but it rarely overwhelms them—Dobyns’ impulse to storytelling always shrugs it off with a whaddyagonnado shrug and images that hit heart and head like little arrows, as in the ending of “Street Corner Romance”:
...You
see, we are no good
in emotional isolation. Even a tire iron yearns
for a steely mate, and love, what is love but
that dark reflecting lake that any creature
may have the good or ill-fortune to glance into.
(I love the unobtrusive, but felt, internal slant-rhyme of mate/lake.)
Re-reading Cemetery Nights brought back vivid memories of the pleasure I first took in the collection, a pleasure in surreal narrative I later found in James Tate as well. When I picked up a much later book, Winter’s Journey (2010), I found that Dobyns’ long line and tone remained intact, and if anything more personal—the anger with the “low, dishonest decade” of the Naughts courses through these poems, that wry melancholy now tinged with bitter bewilderment, and, in poems like “Napatree Point,” prescience: ...And I’m/ still no closer to understanding how to live in a country/ that’s become an embarrassment... Same, Stephen, same.
Around the turn of the century, I met Stephen Dobyns after he gave a reading, and was able to tell him how much I’d liked Cemetery Nights, and how some of the rhetorical stances in those poems informed my own later practice; he accepted my awkward praise with graciousness, and we sipped our post-reading reception wine. And now he’s dead. How difficult to be an angel./ In order to forgive, they have no memory./ In order to be good, they’re always forgetting./ How else could heaven be run?
Gregory Crosby is the author of Said No One Ever (2021) and Walking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion (2018).
