Different Hours: Poems [Paperback]

Stephen Dunn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2002

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

A wise and graceful new collection by one of our "major, indispensable poets" (Sidney Lea). The mysteries of Eros and Thanatos, the stubborn endurance of mind and body in the face of diminishment--these are the undercurrents of Stephen Dunn's eleventh volume. "I am interested in exploring the 'different' hours," he says, "not only of one's life, but also of the larger historical and philosophical life beyond the personal."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This sensitive 11th book from Dunn (Loosestrife) largely sticks to familiar territory: in one central poem, a "master" advises the speaker to "Use what's lying around the house./ Make it simple and sad." Dunn follows that advice unwaveringly: his short lyrics in conversational language address the difficulties and small victories of everyday lifeAfears on turning 60, marital quarrels, suburban weather, "the commonplace and its contingencies." Like Gerald Stern and Philip Booth, Dunn strives to describe the travails of ordinary people in language not only simplified but generalized: a friend's divorce leads the speaker to say "no one can know what goes on/ in the pale trappings of bedrooms," while scary headlines and advancing age prompt the remark that "it's tempting to believe/ we lived in simpler times." Poems about places offer few surprises: Italy yields "the chosen gloomy beauty of a tourist town," and a series of poems about Dunn's native South Jersey produce phrases almost as stale. Many poems try so hard for their transparency that they become predictable, so hard to be representative that their speakers seem too normal to be true, even the usually multi-valent Odysseus, who here "sailed through storm and wild sea/ as if his beloved were all that ever mattered." Such mythical alter egos, when they appear, disappear into the dominant mode here, that of a quiet family man who wants to be kind and to marvel at the ordinary, "amazed/ that the paper has been delivered." Fans will pick up this book to get news of his latest doings, but despite its accessibility, it will draw few new subscribers. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

Wisdom might be something we could only learn through a language like Stephen Dunn's, unbearably fearless and beautiful. -- Gerald Stern

[L]eads us down a trail of wisdom, teaching us to live like the poet. -- Alicia Suskin Ostriker

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (January 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393322327
• ISBN-13: 978-0393322323
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #314,420 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Elegant and Provocative Book, October 10, 2000

By 

Nick Ingram - See all my reviews

This review is from: Different Hours: Poems (Hardcover)

For a couple of decades Stephen Dunn's poems have been a source of insight and solace best described by the title of one of his books, "Local Time."

His focus is often the complex and absorbing relationships between lovers, family members, friends, opponents - how art/nature are both incidental and intrinsic to the lives we lead.

This book is a masterful rendering of time - imagined and compelling in each gesture. To read "Different Hours" as philosophy is to miss the artful storytelling. And yet it is not without a subtle nod to philosophy with its tough-minded admissions, its gentle refusals.

Like the great Stanley Kunitz, Dunn's music is pianissimo, say along the lines of an astringent Schumann opus - a pared-down Scriabin etude.

Read the book for its many rewards. It is simply exquisite.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Book That is Also a Friend, October 9, 2004

By 

Gianmarco Manzione (Tampa, FL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Different Hours: Poems (Paperback)

Few poets achieve such a plainspoken poignancy as Mr. Dunn. I think of Cavafy, C.K. Williams, Philip Larkin, Horace -- masters of the craft gifted with the knack for discovering scraps of truth within the simplest words. "You might as well be a clown/big silly clothes, no evidence of desire," Dunn suggests in the book's opening poem. This is the language that gets you clawing through the pages to get to the lines that know you, that approve of some private cowardice or failure you wouldn't dare confess even to the closest friend.

But there is a kind of trust Dunn builds with the reader here, a wisdom so simple yet complicated enough that you could not quite have put your finger on it as quickly or accurately as he. I mean how his poems know that "as we fall in love/we are already falling out of it." How they resist self-pity in the face of fate: "Because in my family the heart goes first/and hardly anybody makes it out of his fifties/I think I'll stay up late with a few bandits of my choice and resist good advice." It is the sort of statement that gets me flying out of my chair pumping my fist as though I'm cherring on the home team at a high school football game. I am happy for the speaker of these poems the way I was happy for Hulk Hogan as a kid. Dave Smith writes that Dunn may not be correct, but he is never wrong. Mr. Smith, himself a phenomenal and overlooked American poet, is exactly right: Dunn's voice is unafraid, skeptical, warm, consoling, bitter, celebratory and -- most of all -- accurate.

Books like "Different Hours" become "tombstones on our lives" as James Merrill says of love. I know that is true of my own experience with it. I was in a Virgin Records, still reeling from an atrocious break-up whose pain refused to leave me. The book collection upstairs was as miserable as I was at the moment; shelves so poorly stacked that it seemed the store was about to do away with selling books altogether. But then a dark and vibrant cover caught my eye; a book by someone named Stephen Dunn whom I had not only never heard of but who also happened to have won the Pulitzer. In the terrible frame of mine I was in that afternoon, I needed nothing more than to listen to what these poems had to say:

Those Trotskys of relationships,
perpetual revolution their motto,
their impatient hearts
dangerous to all that's complacent,

I understand them perfectly
and also why someone they've left behind
might travel all the way to Mexico
with a pickaxe to put an end to things.

Coming across these poems for the first time, it felt as though they were spoken from somewhere inside of me, scratched into my skin; lines that were extended hands strong enough to pull me out of the dark. If angels are not physical presences, then they are actions. They are moments like these in which you hear your name called from a poorly stocked bookshelf in a record store and stumble upon the road that takes you to who you are. Though I am no longer a captive of the bitter junkyard that was my heart at that time, I have never stopped enjoying these poems. I read over "Different Hours" as well as Dunn's "Loosestrife" and "Selected Poems" to this day. Taken as a whole, Dunn's work is one of the most reliable and compassionate friends I have ever had.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow...welcome back to a time of Yeats and Eliot..., June 6, 2006

By 

C. Mendoza-tolentino "CMT" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Different Hours: Poems (Paperback)

I first picked this book up before a class where we studied the Odyssey and while at the Columbia Bookstore I randomly opened the book up to 'Odysseus's Secret,' a poem that takes the Odysseus story and makes it applicable to the way with which we live our lives, moving with and dealing with the twists and turns that make us who we are. Suffice it to say after reading that I bought it immediately. After reading some of the other poems, most especially 'The Reverse Side,' I fell in love with this and can see why it was chosen to win the Pulitzer. The poetry uses such sparse language, yet conveys and addresses some of the major hurdles we deal with in life. I loved it and have placed it on my shelf next to some Yeats and Eliot.