In formally deft poems that often read like songs and prayers, Josh Dugat pays devotional, hoverfly attention to the full gamut of creation, from mustard-seed minutia (the “cat’s blue pupil” of a gas pilot light or the “mica wings” of an insect caught in a windshield’s crack) to sublime, leviathan immensities of nature, belief, and love (Goliath’s “majestic” hands, the “abyssal plains” of a dying whale). A fetus grows in the immense and growing ocean of its mother’s womb. Even large words hold smaller ones, (“listened/lists” and “vice/device”), and all realms—the great and small—exchange their secrets. This breviary of a debut collection offers lessons in how to live.— Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems
The poems in Josh Dugat’s Great and Small are as playful in language as they are heart-shaking in implication. I appreciate this poet for the way he keenly observes the things of this world in one hand while grasping toward the wider meanings with the other.— Carrie Fountain, author of The Life
Josh Dugat’s Great and Small is a first book, and its variety shows the all-roads-at-once exuberance that characterizes debut volumes. What makes Great and Small so interesting is that most of those roads lead to the southern landscapes of Dugat’s childhood and current life. He evokes his everyday world with crafty intelligence and gentle lyricism. The book has many poems, all quite different, that surprised me, such as “Six Months Before Marriage,” “Bookmarks,” “Rodeo,” or “Setting the Leaf in my Grandmother’s Table.” Each made some moment of consciousness, great or small, unforgettable.— Dana Gioia, author of Meet Me at the Lighthouse
It’s always struck me as a highest aspiration for poetry to yearn after, what William Wordsworth called “some philosophic Song / Of Truth that cherishes our daily life.” In Great and Small, Josh Dugat sings toward the very ideal of that philosophic song, cherishing our daily life in poems of rich music and delicate rhyme. Alive to the conundrums that riddle our contemporary world—anxious technologies, lamentable injustices—Dugat’s poems also pulse with mythic precedent. So it is, despite a sober-eyed, fatherly look at contemporary culture, these poems veer away from the ease of critique into ground both rarer and worthier: they take upon themselves the work of praise. It’s hard work, praise. The mind feels a strange responsibility to think itself toward misery, but here, in these wonderful pages, the intelligence is what learns to tremble with joy.— Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Arrows
