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.