Loosestrife
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
"Dunn's new poems are driven by the same tireless force that made his New and Selected Poems (1994) so powerful, but there is a new tone here, a deepening of his recognition of life's perversities."—Booklist
In this tenth collection, Stephen Dunn turns his "wise, well-practiced eye" (Library Journal) on an America growing ever more stringent with its daily mercies. Not content merely to observe the world, Dunn's stance is always dual, complicit. And as he navigates through each paradox of his moral and aesthetic and erotic selves, this poet, described by Sydney Lea as one "who remains open to contradictions," travels to a place of exact and complicated vision.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dunn's graceful and stirring collection is a walk through an ecosystem where loneliness is breathed in with the air and the wildlife takes on all too human problems. Dunn (Work & Love; Landscape at the End of the Century) begins with notes from the foggy valley of the broken relationship ("his mind cut loose/ from his heart/ like a dinghy in cold, still water"). Free will is supplanted by the inevitability of loss, and nothing can save romance: "Everything was clear, and nothing much/ the better for it./ They agreed it was a matter of caring,/ and each felt the dull courage that comes/ from caring less." In following poems, there may be fewer sad humans, but the animals have inherited the melancholy. A tiger cub raised by goats discovers its nature and "A lone tern turns in the blowsy wind." By the time we reach the concluding 10-part title poem, we are fixed in a real place, the woodlands of Southern New Jersey. There the unusually warm winter of 1995 is host to the little deaths, spiritual and corporeal, that accompany a false spring.
