Pallbearers Envying the One who Rides

Book excerpt: In Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides, we see the world through the melancholic eyes of Heart - blood-pumping organ, lover, poet and sceptical philosopher of the everyday. Heart reflects on the vagaries of love, the cruelties of time, on 'whether he is masculine enough', and on 'how some folks get pearls, others pebbles'. Dividing the Heart poems is the long Oh, Immobility, Death's Vast Associate, a jazzy disquisition on human isolation and inaction in the midst of a planet full of people brooding over similar concerns. With his characteristic black humour, maniacal imagination, and in straightforward language that rollercoasters in tone but with a mythic undertow, Stephen Dobyns has written a cycle of medieval morality poems for a new dark age.