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     Few American poets today are drawn to the mediums of epic and allegory, yet Stephen Dobyns, in his dark new work, has managed to shift the parameters of both. The hero of this “epic” is Heart, a single embodiment of organ, emotion, and character who trawls through the mundane reality of his days searching for sustenance and meaning. He – and Heart is definitely a he – seeks to answer the question, “can sadness be pre-existing?” The next hundred pages comprise a shrill, resounding yes.

     Dobyns brilliantly subverts the aspirations of the epic form in order to reveal its inadequacy in the face of today’s consumer-driven society: in place of glory Heart finds only vainglory. As a symbol he is used up, dried out, and stripped down – dislodged from the core of his body and society. Early on we guess that part of Dobyns’s plan is to reinvest Heart with heart, which is why during the course of his quest he does not so much explore as implore, as if he could transsubstantiate the experience of discovery into the fulfilment of love. He is neither hero nor anti-hero but a wound personified, a “wound without pain” as Dobyns writes. This numbness is one of Heart’s main afflictions, and provokes a desperation for human contact which ultimately drives the poems toward their solitary, forlorn conclusion: love exists only in the shifting light of a night sky, heavenly bodies in the shape of stars.

     Heart inhabits a world where beauty “intensified transforms joy to heartache”, where friendship is wound up in bribes, and sex just “two creatures banging together in desperation before they return to their existential stalls”. In other words, a world in which the lyric poem is no longer a viable form of communication but an embellishment not to be trusted. Thus the language of the poems is deflated – “common diction” being the language of “lovelorn fictions” – and there is no attempt to satisfy the ear with any formal rhyme or metre. In this way Dobyns uses language to reveal the restlessness and tedium at the core of Heart’s existence; the poems’ long, drawn-out sentences have the effect of overwhelming the reader with a barrage of empty insight, while the poems themselves melt into one another until their meaning evaporates into a cloud of disillusion and regret. Like Heart’s flawed memory, they confuse and blur the edges of reality:

                           As for last week, Heart has only
an indistinct idea, making past and future equally dim,
while subjectivity and shifting biases compose the filter
through which Heart sees the world, if he can be said 
to see the world at all.

     But Heart is a poet, and must find a way to reconcile the nature of his world to the one he transforms into verse; this too is at the centre of his quest. However, the fatal songs of the lusty sirens – the critics – distract him from his course. For example, in ‘Can Poetry Matter?’ Heart’s attempts to write lyric poetry finally reach a level of absurdity that can only please a critic. The moon, first a “sad wafer of the heart’s distress”, becomes finally the “immense hyena of an introverted motorboat”, an “upside down lamppost of barbershop quartet”. As the images founder, the critic grows more excited. Soon the two form “a sausage factory of poetry”:

Heart supplying the pig snouts and rectal tissue of language
which the critic encloses in a thin membrane of explication.

Later in ‘MacFleckna’s Storefront Church’, Dobyns parodies the figure of (one guesses) Helen Vendler, “the Boss Tweed of poetry’s Tammany Hall”, as a sort of belle dame sans merci. The siren’s call fools Heart into believing that immortality depends on the whim of the critic rather than the strength of the work. When MacFleckna rejects his poetry, he decides he must write her an ode, and so Heart abandons his muse for the siren. The consequences of this act are fatal for poetry; we begin to understand why Dobyns has chosen to curtail the lyric impulse in his contemporary epic. These days, he warns, even poetry is a commodity to be bought and sold, a dirty industry with a corrupt hierarchy. Heart’s admission that he is “dying meat” which will some day “decompose” takes on a double meaning in light of Dobyns’s sceptical attitude toward the lyric: language is no longer a balm but a medium of commerce. In fact one might understand the entire work as an exercise in “decomposition” in which the epic narrative moves in reverse: the hero ultimately falters, and the world itself is bled dry until there “is not a single vibration, all colours ashen, no horizon”. Even poetry’s function has become the revelation of defeat rather than triumph.

     One gets the feeling that Dobyns, alongside Heart, would like to “drink and be whole again beyond confusion”, but he is too aware that life is a continuum between being lost and being found, and that usually we are on the losing side. This is why the poems are, on the one hand calm and controlled, on the other raucous and bursting; one never quite knows whether Dobyns wants to bring order out of chaos or chaos out of order. But if Heart is searching for a Jungian sense of wholeness, he is also searching for a myth to live by. This, finally, is the irony which lifts the work out of its swampy malaise – Heart is the hero of his own myth, the one we read, but he never learns it. Perhaps this is Dobyns’s way of commenting on the heroism of ordinary life, the simple act of surviving, while reminding us that even in a world reimagined as a garbage heap of body parts, poetry still gets to the heart of the matter.