The Day's Last Light Reddens the Leaves of the Copper Beech

Among the many difficult life lessons revealed in Dobyns's 14th collection (after 2010's Winter's Journey), two seem most prominent: the realization that "each person's golden age is turned to tin" and the futility of trying to "determine/ the end of an action at the start of an action." To be human is to be a victim of chance, luck, and diminishing time, continually seduced by "the old subjects/ in slinky gowns." Exhibiting the narrative skill of a poet who has in fact published nearly two dozen novels, Dobyns's poems offer telling parables in which ordinary people—a man without friends, a would-be writer, a zookeeper—encounter "the line that separates/ what might happen from what might not," forging unpredictable yet somehow inevitable lives with whatever dignity is left to them. If generally chagrined and resigned on the surface, these modestly but exactingly crafted poems—Dobyns is a master of the subtle, embedded rhyme—are punctuated with sharp wit and a deep understanding of their besieged subjects.