Edward Dorn's Collected Poems (2012), fourth selection (from Geography, 1965)

Some favourite passages:


On the bed of the vast promiscuity
of the poet's senses is turned
the multiple world....

opening lines of "Song: The astronauts"

bent is an attitude

I've settled on now

        to define a man

whose attention is forced down

from "The problem of the poem

for my daughter, left unsolved"

...before the bite of the sun quelled the bite

of the stars, we left....

*

The eye

can be arbitrary,

but its subject matter cannot.

Thus the beauty of some women.

from "Idaho Out"

The occasion for this excursion is in the selected strings

of a life gone terribly lonely. It will be a march.

A frail cloud moves with silence into the window.

No sound in the store. No bell on the door.

*

...in the woven light

of a backroom.

*

...in the ennui of the falling sun....

*

...all things have an insistence of their own.

from "Six Views 

from the same window of the Northside Grocery"

 ...indolent winter stars

are in her eyes

          indolent as she resides

all seasons by the fork

of my desire.

the last lines of "Love Song"

...a growth

of indetermination

while waiting 

out the season

*

I am a casual fool

now

I do so regard

the labor 

of my own

                  careful

peace of mind.

from "Poem in Five Parts"

this is no judgement, this is

the weight of dissimilar things bound together

by a strictly regulated common deprivation

the low and the high, no middle, held in a smiling equilibrium

you may eat only the shit I give you.

*

I became that land and wandered out of it.

*

...my wounded middle years,

                                                a practical self-pity

*

My mother, moving slowly in a grim kitchen

and my stepfather moving slowly down the green rows of corn

these are my unruined and damned hieroglyphs.

*

...and the land was pledged 

to private use, the walnut dropped in the autumn on the ground

green, and lay black in the dead grass in the spring.

from "The sense comes over me, and the waning

light of man by the 1st National Bank"

 Buy Collected Poems directly from the publisher.