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Summary
Summary
"Beauty isn't nice. Beauty isn't fair..." So, in part, states an epigraph for this stunning new collection, his thirteenth, by the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry (2000). First traversing betrayal and loss, Stephen Dunn then moves to speak of new love, with its attendant pleasures and questioning. The title poem, perhaps emblematic of the book as a whole, is evocative of beauty's often surprising manifestations--even in the light of tragedy--as on that terrible day "when those silver planes came out of the perfect blue."
Because beauty jars us, makes us look twice, it is as startling as a good poem, and as insistent. Fortunately, it is never too late to search for the right words for what we've seen, felt, endured. With quiet authority Dunn enacts what it feels like to be a particular man at a particular juncture of his life--struggling not to deny, but to name, then rename.
Author Notes
Stephen Dunn is the author of seventeen poetry collections, including What Goes On: New and Selected Poems 1995--2009 and, most recently, Here and Now. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his collection Different Hours. He has also been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Richard Stockton College, he lives in Frostburg, Maryland, with his wife, the writer Barbara Hurd.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this moody, introspective collection, Dunn, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, focuses on lost love and domestic solitude following the break-up of a long-term relationship. The speaker, alone, stares at his furniture and makes desolate pronouncements like ?your rocking chair/ isn?t rocking anymore.? Or, he remembers his ex-wife?s gourmet dinners and, heavy-handedly, finds in them an analogue of the failed relationship: ?Too cruel, I know, but you made me want more,/ and I consumed and withheld.? These poems are plain-spoken and small in their ambitions, suffused with a deep sense of fatigue. Only the slow revelation of marital infidelity (and the frisson of having told new women old stories) seems to enliven the speaker, and then only briefly. In the latter part of the book, Dunn seems to cast about for larger themes, and in a few unfortunate poems tries politics, indulging in comments such as: ?Ground zero, is it possible to get lower?? The poems feel sad, small and wholly out of touch with the broader world, because there is no necessity discernable behind them: ?That was when I realized/ that to believe in nothing/ is a belief too, and not much fun/ either?? After a few peripheral glances at the war on TV, and a nod to Casablanca, the book seems to find a philosophical resting place in defense of the obvious and the sentimental: ?For years I?d taken pride in resisting// the obvious?sunsets, snowy peaks,/ a starlet?s face?yet had come to realize/ even those, seen just right, can have/ their edgy place. And the sentimental,// beauty?s sloppy cousin, that enemy,/ can?t it have a place too?? In some sense, this is where we?ve been heading all along, but without much insistence. (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Booklist Review
Donning the mask of insouciance, Dunn affects a light touch with clever tropes, swinging riffs, and touches of charming self-deprecation, but this seductiveness doesn't prevent him from confronting pain, folly, or ambiguity. In his last collection, Local Visitations 0 (2003), this Pulitzer Prize winner improvised on the myth of Sisyphus and paid tribute to writers he reveres. Here he cuts loose from allusion (although "Achilles in Love" is a gem) and writes with naked honesty about all the mad intensity and diabolical delusions of love. Sexy and smart, Dunn's musings on lost lovers, galling moments, and our impulse to revise history are exhilarating in their accuracy and percussive musicality, their wise-guy toughness and vulnerability. Then, as Dunn considers the confounding "insistence of beauty" and the unnerving persistence of memories, he shifts gears and brings a lyric and intimate perspective to the defining event of our paralyzed time, 9/11, writing with resonant subtlety about deception, and beauty's role in both the sublime, and, perversely, the horrific. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2004 Booklist
Library Journal Review
After hearing a Schubert adagio, critic Kenneth Tynan noted, "There is nothing more beautiful than the happy moments of unhappy men." It works in reverse, too. In this new collection, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Dunn (Different Hours) looks back on a defunct relationship, considering what remains: questions and interpretations of events that sometimes touch that lofty designation, Beauty. Whether or not he is intrinsically happy, Dunn possesses a narrator's eye that insists on seeing beauty dually. As he asserts in the shockingly plainspoken title poem, what at first appears to be beauty may turn out to be something else: "beauty's sloppy cousin, that enemy"-sentimentality. And the effect of true beauty may in fact be confusing; it can provide fewer answers and mean less than we might prefer: "deer prints in the driveway,/that cardinal on a hemlock's lower branch-/I'm amazed they don't insist or signify." Yet as the title implies, beauty does insist, if only in itself-and that's a comfort. These casually delivered yet formally elegant insights make for a beautiful collection. Highly recommended.-Joel Whitney, New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
