Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry [Paperback]

Alan Dugan (Author), Carl Phillips (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 3, 2002

Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, the winner of the National Book Award, presents the life work of a giant of American letters, tracks a forty-year career of honest, tough artistry, and shows a man at nearly 80 years of age and still at the height of his poetic power. Dugan’s new poems continue his career-long concerns with renewed vigor: the poet’s insistence that art is a grounded practice threatened by pretension, the wry wit, the jibes at the academic and sententious, and the arresting observations on the quotidian battles of life. All the while he peppers his poems with humorous images of the grim and daunting topics of existential emptiness.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Dugan's 1961 Poems (that year's Yale Younger Poets winner) turned much of the poetry establishment on its ear: Dugan's irreverent or cynical poems, full of horse sense and completely resistant to gloss, spoke to a community of readers soured on old forms and unattached to new ones. A celebration of spring showed how "the skunk cabbage generates its/ frost-thawing fart-gas in New Jersey and the first/ crocuses appear..." Other poems attacked America's growing involvement in Vietnam, and still others treated sex in memorably, newly flippant ways: "In spring when the ego arose from the genitals/ after a winter's refrigeration, the sergeants/ were angry..." Subsequent books (Poems Two, Poems Three and so on) continued Dugan's project of comic, bleak and formally varied commentary on a dirty, terminally frayed and yet attractive America. Yet Dugan remained aloof from the academy; as a result, his profile gradually dimmed, though he retained an enthused (and amused) core of fans, among them ex-Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. This carefully constructed, funny and sometimes unvarying volume combines all six of Dugan's previous books with a decade's worth of new verse. One of the best of the new poems finds a domestic urgency: "Don't walk barefoot in the bathroom," it advises; "There was someone in the mirror who I killed." "You'll find in my Collected Poems," another new poem explains, "the palliative answer/ to your stupid questions": many readers just might, and the book's nomination as a National Book Award finalist should bring more of them to it.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Buy this book. Not because Dugan has won the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, Prix de Rome, and Yale Younger Poets awards but because he brings an intriguing and idiosyncratic vision to American poetry. This collection includes 35 new poems as well as the best poems from six earlier collections. Dugan examines a cornucopia of topics, but each poem probes one of life's truths. What you remember most after reading Dugan's poems is his sense of play, as evidenced by a few of the titles: "The Esthetics of Circumcision," "On the Supposed Immortality of Orchids," "Gargoyle's Song for a Warming Trend," and "Funeral Oration for a Mouse." Sometimes you're not sure what's happening in a Dugan poem "Marry. Sweets, tarts and sweets,/ come among soots and sherds. The dairy of the breasts" but that sense of mystery and adventure propels you forward. Indeed, Dugan is best when he weds the quotidian with a sense of life's mysteries: "Then the cat began to eat the mouse head first/ instead of going for the easier belly or asshole./ I had always wanted to see the relation/ of blood and roses restated in some novel way,/ without the biological unconsciousness of thorns." Some of the Sixties poems feel dated, but many of these pieces are still fresh. Recommended for all collections. Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press (September 3, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1583225129
• ISBN-13: 978-1583225127
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.2 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #171,317 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Alan Dugan, a career in brief., December 10, 2001

By 

Daryl Stanley Rogers (Lexington, KY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry (Hardcover)

Alan Dugan, first published in the early sixties, has always been a rebel. His work is easily recognized, dense and irreverant. He has maintained a style throughout the years that is unmistakable. If you want to produce modern poetry, do yourself a favor and read Alan Dugan.

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rare & perfect stuff!, December 15, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry (Hardcover)

Forget the dismal frightened little p-c conformists whose fears have annihilated their sensibilities & whose greatest thrill in life is trashing brilliant iconoclastic talent. This is first rate stuff, cerebral & visceral & on target at all times. This is Poetry!

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Old Friend, September 2, 2004

By 

F. Roberts (Frankfort, KY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry (Paperback)

I first read Alan Dugan in 1962. I have all six, now seven, volumes of his poetry. I taught his poems to my students of all ages for 30 years. His words make him one of my oldest, most trusted friends. Too bad I didn't teach enough children to feel the irony in "On an East Wind from the Wars" or "How We Heard the Name." Now we "ba-bas" are really in for it. Read Dugan if you haven't. Start with volume 1.