Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry

National Book Award Winner
New York Times Notable Book of the Year, 2002
Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, 2002
Book Sense Poetry Top 10, 2002
American Library Association Notable Book for Poetry, 2003
Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, 2003

Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry presents the life work of a giant of American letters: this monumental collection, which includes 35 new poems, belongs on the shelf of the great literature of post-World War II America. It tracks a forty-year career of honest, tough artistry, and shows a man at nearly 80 years of age still at the height of his poetic power. Alan 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.

ALAN DUGAN’s first book, Poems, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. Dugan has won the National Book Award (twice), the Pulitzer Prize, the Prix de Rome, and an award in literature from the American Academy and the Institute of Arts and Letters. He has been a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, the recipient of two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, and a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. He died in 2003.