The Day's Last Light Reddens the Leaves of the Copper Beech - by Stephen Dobyns (Paperback)

About the Book

Best-selling poet/novelist Stephen Dobyns focuses on the hard truth of mortality, including sonnets about the recent death of his wife.

Book Synopsis

Best-selling poet/novelist Stephen Dobyns focuses on the hard truth of mortality, including sonnets about the recent death of his wife.

Review Quotes

"Stephen Dobyns is a rare breed, an award-winning poet and a crime novelist whom Stephen King praises." -Boston Globe

"Poet and novelist Stephen Dobyns brings to us a poignant collection about love, life, and the slow wisdom that 'all stories are sad when they reach their end.' . . . Dobyns, whose earlier poetry collections have won prestigious awards including the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and the Melville Cain Award from the Poetry Society of America, becomes, in this elegiac collection, a poet attempting at truth, even its most painful and even selfish admissions. Largely confessional in nature, Dobyns's exercise in grief is one to be witnessed." -Rain Taxi

"[A collection of] courageous observations about the way one endures as he considers big questions about death-of his love, his friends, and himself. [Dobyns] never hides from the tragic and the honest. . . . While this may not be a book about marriage, it is certainly about the lessons the poet has learned through marriage, which he may well be more reflective about now that his wife has passed. Sprinkled throughout the collection are a half-dozen parable poems, offering more lessons and contemplation of them. Dobyns's brave and sincere poems will remind readers of their own humanness." -Booklist

"All of the poems are unflinchingly beautiful as Dobyns explores the transience of life on earth. These are poems for those who respect honesty. Dobyns is a poet who is true to the script God offers a fallen humanity. . . . As a whole, Stephen Dobyns's The Day's Last Light Reddens the Leaves of the Copper Beech is poetry by a man daring to look death squarely in the eye. He is a poet of great courage as he broods on life and death. His relentless imagination erodes the power of death's presence and makes of it a lesser reality. Reading Dobyns, one is not alone with the inevitable outcome of our birth. The beauty of his language knocks death from its pedestal." -The Journal

"This new book by Stephen Dobyns is one of the rare books of poems that actually deserves the adjective 'unflinching.' The poems focus on the hard truth of what it means to live in time, to feel that what we love is destined to vanish and that the truths we rely on to bear us forward may prove ephemeral. Instead of skirting the facts by acts of self-removal or by focusing on issues more tractable, the poems give us the front-line news from the disaster zone. In their determination not to deceive or be deceived, they counter the temptation to helplessness by a continuous enactment of courage and honesty. And by their refusing to be jaded or self-pitying, by reaching out to create a large cast of characters, presented in a wide variety of genres, they include us in their circle of concern. Dark as they often are, they leave us strengthened and enlarged." -Carl Dennis

"Stephen Dobyns' poems have never been of the Tower, nor do they belong in the parlor. Instead, he has struck me, for over forty years, as a poet of great courage and a restless, relentless imagination. He never, never stops trying to do the impossible: to tell the truth. This is a book of mature brilliance." -Thomas Lux

"The Day's Last Light returns us to the origins of poetry: story and song. For nearly four decades, Dobyns has written poetry that interrupts the deadening machinery of our invention to reassert the primacy of human relations and the remnants of wisdom we gain that alight our radiant journeys, which makes him one of America's most relevant and treasured poets. With characteristic wit and literary surliness, this volume continues his big soul reflections. Right now, someone is checking a math equation hoping to unite theories of relativity and black holes, but you are here with this book in your hand

About the Author

Stephen Dobyns is the author of 23 novels, including the popular "Saratoga" crime novels, 14 books of poetry, one book of short stories, and two collections of essays on poetry. His books of poetry include Winter's Journey (Copper Canyon Press, 2010); Mystery, So Long (2005); The Porcupine's Kisses (2002); Do They Have a Reason? (2000); Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides (Penguin, 1999); Common Carnage (1996); Velocities: New and Selected Poems 1966-1992 (1994); Cemetery Nights (1987), which won a Melville Cane Award; Black Dog, Red Dog (1984), which was a winner in the National Poetry Series; Heat Death (1980); and Concurring Beasts (1972), which was the 1972 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. His novels include Boy in the Water (Holt/Metropolitan, 1999); The Church of Dead Girls (1997); Saratoga Fleshpot (1995); The Wrestler's Cruel Study (1993); and Saratoga Haunting (1993). His novels have been translated into more than ten languages. Among his many honors and awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Dobyns has worked as a reporter for Detroit News, and has written review for such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Times Literary Supplement. 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. He currently lives in Westerly, Rhode Island.