Poetry
5.5 x 8.5, 80 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-59766-038-9
paper: $14.95 |
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from I Went Through a Box of Emily’s Shell Jewelry
I saw Emily all over again
when I went through the jewelry she made out of shells.
When I picked up a Frilled California Venus shell and
a Milky Venus shell that lay together on a metal setting
without a clasp, a note beside them marked "next";
and when I picked up a fragmented letter with a dedication
to someone named Clair; and when I held a False Angel
Wing shell
wrapped in linen cloth, held it
alone just to feel the weight
and smoothness of it in my hand―it was like
being there again with her
when we worked or made love after one of our walks.
I could smell
her secretions in the room again, and I felt suddenly alert,
missing her presence.
The illness she had spilled her
like so much spit. I didn't and still don't know what there is
to know about it. Even now, after eight years,
all of my theories, everything I name
becomes a synonym for some other complexity
or perplexity. Something took her over. |
Doren Robbins’s latest collection is as open and immediate as letters from a friend, albeit a friend who feels deeply the accumulated weight of experience. Suffused with an almost defiant tenderness, the poems speak of love and dispossession and loss, and of the power of memory to resuscitate fragments of our lives. They are at once a howl of finely tuned outrage at the world’s unyielding brutality, which we can at times withstand only by becoming brutal ourselves, and a celebration of the human need to find something that endures—to conjure meaning from impermanence.
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In addition to several chapbooks, Doren Robbins has published five previous full-length collections of poetry, including Parking Lot Mood Swing: Autobiographical Monologues and Prose Poetry (Cedar Hills Books, 2004) and Driving Face Down (Eastern Washington University Press, 2001), which won the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. His poems, prose poems, and short fiction have appeared in a vast array of literary magazines and anthologies, among them the American Poetry Review, Kayak, Sulphur, and For Rexroth, and have earned him numerous prizes and awards, including a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts.
Before embarking on a career in teaching, Robbins spent over two decades working as a cook and as a carpenter. His interests extend to art, and he has produced poster-poems to benefit the Salvadoran Medical Relief Fund, poetsagainstthewar.org, and PEN. He is also the cofounder and coeditor of the literary journal Third Rail. He holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and currently teaches literature and creative writing at Foothill College, in Los Altos, California, where he is director of the Foothill College Writers’ Conference.
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“These are remarkable, fiery poems. Poems that would urge any poet on, language that tears open reality. I think this is Doren Robbins’s finest book, and I’ve admired his work for a good while. The imagination, its energy and precision, is immense. There’s a delicate observation of even the rawest materials, a tenderness for humanity in all its cruelty, stupidity, and often invisible dignity and grace, that feels to me like his peculiar, original contribution to—well, to the puzzle of what we have become: people, Americans, men and women today, above all those who are “absent,” unregistered, undocumented in both senses.”
—Adrienne Rich
“Doren Robbins grows evermore himself, evermore an original and reliable critic, prophet, singer. His poems are ever richer, combining now unfaltering powerful and tender memory with wisdom. Real wisdom. And he’s writing the best political poems I know.”
—Gerald Stern
“Doren Robbins's poems are both poignantly personal and boldly political. They are passionate and lyrical, as you expect of the best in poetry. He is a keen observer of family life as well as the larger world outside, and a pleasure to read.”
—Howard Zinn
“Robbins’s work sounds very little like most of what is being published in America by poets his age. . . . He comes out of another tradition, one we forget in these indifferent times at our own peril, the tradition of Villon, of Corbière, Céline, Henry Miller, Tom McGrath, and most recently Gerald Stern, the great outsiders who bless our daily lives with their boundless love and rage.”
—Philip Levine
“Knowing the limited capacity of art to redeem anybody’s suffering, Robbins’s poems provide no such obvious safety net. On the other hand, the voice in his poems, with its impeccable contralto of hope and revulsion, reminds us not to accept any limits other than our own resilient skepticism.”
—Bill Mohr, Beyond Baroque magazine |
