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Better Together
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Stephen Dunn has produced a very impressive body of work which avoids grand themes and focuses on the details. His "Essay on the Personal," could almost serve as his poetic mission statement: "Because finally the personal / is all that matters, / we spend years describing stones, /chairs, abandoned farmhouses." These personal obsession aren't the whole picture, though. They lead, ultimately, outward, in the individual's wish to understand others and to be understood. Of the new poems, "Decorum," about an argument over a profane word in a creative writing class, is the standout.
From Publishers Weekly
"I love abstractions, I love / to give them a nouny place to live, / a firm seat in the balcony / of ideas, while music plays." Dunn ( Landscape at the End of the Century ) doesn't lapse from the human in his affection for ideas or in his playful working with them; his poetry can read like a conversation held within the generous confines of an unusually abundant self. He and his ideas are good company for us. Part of the persuasion is accomplished with images: in "Nova Scotia," jellyfish "washed up / like small blue parachutes"; in "The Snow Leopard" a girl is "half rockette" and "half American flag." But so much depends upon the billowing up and the resting of Dunn's thoughts, on their sheer movement. That's what forms and opens the poems, makes reading them seem like hobnobbing with someone who is both more observant and more precise than you could have been. We may hardly notice the skill of the movement, how fluent the monologue, but it marks us again and again: "Last night Joan Sutherland was nuancing / the stratosphere on my fine-tuned tape deck, / and there was my dog Buster with a flea rash, / his head in his privates. Even for Buster /this was something like happiness." The collection includes work from eight past books and 16 new poems.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews
Stephen Dunn has produced a very impressive body of work which avoids grand themes and focuses on the details. His "Essay on the Personal," could almost serve as his poetic mission statement: "Because finally the personal / is all that matters, / we spend years describing stones, /chairs, abandoned farmhouses." These personal obsession aren't the whole picture, though. They lead, ultimately, outward, in the individual's wish to understand others and to be understood. Of the new poems, "Decorum," about an argument over a profane word in a creative writing class, is the standout.
From Publishers Weekly
"I love abstractions, I love / to give them a nouny place to live, / a firm seat in the balcony / of ideas, while music plays." Dunn ( Landscape at the End of the Century ) doesn't lapse from the human in his affection for ideas or in his playful working with them; his poetry can read like a conversation held within the generous confines of an unusually abundant self. He and his ideas are good company for us. Part of the persuasion is accomplished with images: in "Nova Scotia," jellyfish "washed up / like small blue parachutes"; in "The Snow Leopard" a girl is "half rockette" and "half American flag." But so much depends upon the billowing up and the resting of Dunn's thoughts, on their sheer movement. That's what forms and opens the poems, makes reading them seem like hobnobbing with someone who is both more observant and more precise than you could have been. We may hardly notice the skill of the movement, how fluent the monologue, but it marks us again and again: "Last night Joan Sutherland was nuancing / the stratosphere on my fine-tuned tape deck, / and there was my dog Buster with a flea rash, / his head in his privates. Even for Buster /this was something like happiness." The collection includes work from eight past books and 16 new poems.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews
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