Product Description

Justly celebrated as one of our strongest poets, Stephen Dunn selects from his eight collections and presents sixteen new poems marked by the haunting "Snowmass Cycle." .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #542669 in Books
• Published on: 1995-05-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780393313000
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
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.

From Library Journal
This substantial volume brings together two decades' worth of selections from Dunn's eight previous collections (most recently, Landscape at the End of the Century , LJ 3/15/91) and 16 new poems, the most moving of which is "The Snowmass Cycle." In that eight-part work, originally published in Poetry , the poet muses on the task he's set for himself and brilliantly managed, over the years, to fulfill: "Give me a new mouth and I'll be/ a guardian against forgetfulness . . . I want to find the cool, precise language/ for how passion gives rise to passion." Recommended for most collections.
- David Sowd, Formerly with Stark Cty. District Lib., Canton, Ohio
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.