Local Visitations Poems [Hardcover]

A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet of domestic emotions and New Jersey landscapes returns to familiar spaces and themes in this comfortable and comforting (if rarely surprising) 12th book. As in previous volumes, Dunn sorts his poems into related series, all of which exemplify the plain diction and commonsense homilies for which he has been widely admired. The first sequence follows a modern-day Sisyphus, whose middle-aged troubles readers may easily match up with their own: "Sisyphus in the Suburbs," seeking Christmas presents, hopes to "walk through the unappeasable/ crowds as if some right thing/ were findable and might be bestowed." Dunn (Loosestrife, Between Angels, etc.) gathers his newest poems of marital love into a less detailed, perhaps more personal second section ("Best to have a partner whose desire matches yours"). The third and most ambitious sequence imagines a queue of "Great Nineteenth-Century Writers" in the poet's own contemporary South Jersey. These poems merge the chosen writers' favorite themes and phrases into Dunn's own quiet, demotic language: "Dickens in Pleasantville" begins "It is neither the best nor worst of times," while "Melville at Barnegat Light" "could hear sounds/ of life from distant and disappearing shores." Dunn's quiet free verse keeps matters of diction and music on deep background, hoping to focus on ready emotion instead. Here as in his previous work, he offers a plain and sometimes plaintive introspection, a panoply of lightly sketched driveways, shopping malls and seashores, a real attempt to represent his region (South Jersey) as well as a nation's careful coccooning.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Long admired for the intimacy and candor of his plain, pointedly spoken lyrics on the quandaries and ironies of middle-class life, Dunn takes a more overtly literary approach in his first collection since winning the Pulitzer Prize for Different Hours in 2001. The opening section of poems recasts Dunn's average American as the mythic Sisyphus, imprisoned by repetitive work ("a repetition/ which would never mean more/ at the end than at the start") and yet bereft without it ("But more often he finds himself dreaming/ of his rock, wishing it back, the better/ to defend himself against so many hours"). Nearly half the collection transports 19th-century literary figures to contemporary New Jersey towns ("Mary Shelley in Brigantine," "Hawthorne in Tuckerton"), a series of poems more attractive in concept than in practice, where the subjects often fail to transcend the contrivance they inhabit. But the nine poems at the book's center remind us of Dunn's characteristic strengths: his knack for catching the nuances of sexual abandon ("your respective clothes/ Pollocking the floor"), the dilemmas of infidelity ("The Affair"), or our humanizing dependency on love ("Questions"). For larger collections.
Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Dunn won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2000, and his wit, command of language and form, and laser-sharp discernment of the human condition have never been keener than in his twelfth thrillingly lucid collection. His alter ego is Sisyphus, a present-day everyman who stops for a bagel and a newspaper, trawls the aisles of a Grand Union, listens to music and pets the cat, all the while mulling over his rocky predicament, until one day he smiles "the way a gambler smiles / when he finally decides to fold / in order to stay alive." The gods retreat, and Sisyphus feels both relief and a sense of emptiness. Dunn performs a similarly empathic and interpretative act in the poems that give this delectable volume its title, a cycle of clever homages to such "great 19th century writers" as Melville, Hawthorne, George Eliot, Mary Shelley, Lewis Carroll, and Charlotte Bronte, each of whom Dunn envisions residing in a small New Jersey town, dazzled by streetlights and traffic, tongue studs and exposed skin. Donna Seaman
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"Dunn's wit, command of language and form, and laser-sharp discernment of the human condition have never been keener." Donna Seaman, Booklist --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Wise and searching new poems from the winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

In his twelfth collection, his first since winning the Pulitzer Prize, Stephen Dunn turns his keen gaze on Sisyphus, our contemporary Everyman. Free, for the time being, from the power of the gods and the ceaseless weight of the rock, he struggles to navigate twenty-first-century America. In language by turns mordant and tender, often elegiac, Dunn illuminates the quotidian burdens of his all-too-human hero, as well as the abrasions of ambivalence and choice, finally concluding that "here / and there, though mostly here, even fate is reversible / with struggle or luck."

In a second sequence of poems, nineteenth-century novelists become "local visitors" to the author's South Jersey towns. "Chekhov in Port Republic," "Jane Austen in Egg Harbor," "Dostoyevski in Wildwood": these inventions and others give Dunn provocative new latitudes. As in his previous books, "he balances the casual and the vivid as he plumbs the ambiguity and mystery of human relations" (New York Times Book Review).

Stephen Dunn teaches at Richard Stockton College in Pomona, New Jersey.