The Insistence of Beauty: Poems - Softcover

Dunn, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393327434 ISBN 13: 9780393327434

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006

Synopsis

An evocation of beauty's often-surprising manifestations; even in the face of tragedy.

"Beauty isn't nice. Beauty isn't fair;" So, in part, states an epigraph for this stunning new collection, his thirteenth, by the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry (2000). First traversing betrayal and loss, Stephen Dunn then moves to speak of new love, with its attendant pleasures and questioning. The title poem, perhaps emblematic of the book as a whole, is evocative of beauty's often surprising manifestations even in the light of tragedy; as on that terrible day "when those silver planes came out of the perfect blue." Because beauty jars us, makes us look twice, it is as startling as a good poem, and as insistent. Fortunately, it is never too late to search for the right words for what we've seen, felt, endured. With quiet authority Dunn enacts what it feels like to be a particular man at a particular juncture of his life; struggling not to deny, but to name, then rename.

About this title

About the Author

Stephen Dunn is the author of nineteen poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Different Hours, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the recipient of an Academy Award for Literature. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic, and American Poetry Review, among many other publications. A distinguished professor emeritus at Richard Stockton University, he lives in Frostburg, Maryland.

From Publishers Weekly

In this moody, introspective collection, Dunn, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, focuses on lost love and domestic solitude following the break-up of a long-term relationship. The speaker, alone, stares at his furniture and makes desolate pronouncements like "your rocking chair/ isn’t rocking anymore." Or, he remembers his ex-wife’s gourmet dinners and, heavy-handedly, finds in them an analogue of the failed relationship: "Too cruel, I know, but you made me want more,/ and I consumed and withheld." These poems are plain-spoken and small in their ambitions, suffused with a deep sense of fatigue. Only the slow revelation of marital infidelity (and the frisson of having told new women old stories) seems to enliven the speaker, and then only briefly. In the latter part of the book, Dunn seems to cast about for larger themes, and in a few unfortunate poems tries politics, indulging in comments such as: "Ground zero, is it possible to get lower?" The poems feel sad, small and wholly out of touch with the broader world, because there is no necessity discernable behind them: "That was when I realized/ that to believe in nothing/ is a belief too, and not much fun/ either..." After a few peripheral glances at the war on TV, and a nod to Casablanca, the book seems to find a philosophical resting place in defense of the obvious and the sentimental: "For years I’d taken pride in resisting// the obvious—sunsets, snowy peaks,/ a starlet’s face—yet had come to realize/ even those, seen just right, can have/ their edgy place. And the sentimental,// beauty’s sloppy cousin, that enemy,/ can’t it have a place too?" In some sense, this is where we’ve been heading all along, but without much insistence.
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About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0393327434
• ISBN 13: 9780393327434
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 90