Taking a different tack than John Keats in 'Ode to a Nightingale, ' Stephen Dobyns joins sixty-nine poems in Common Carnage, his ninth book of poetry, in order to address the conundrum 'How hard to love the world; we must love the world.' The spiritual intermixed with the bawdy, the courageous with the cowardly, the kindly with the cruel - Common Carnage rejects the decorous and decorative to map the complexity, the common carnage of our lives as it seeks to understand our nature.