Lines of Defense
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“[Stephen Dunn] has taken his place among our major, indispensable poets.”—Miami Herald
In his seventeenth collection of poetry, Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn confronts the lines we fight against and the ones we draw for ourselves. Lines of Defense poignantly captures the absurdities of modern life, expectations derailed, the lived life juxtaposed to the imagined life, and the defenses we don to make do. The poems in Lines of Defense are wry and elegiac, precisely observed and wide-reaching. As with the best of Dunn’s work, they take stock of the quotidian aspects of life, of the essential comedy of getting through the day: finding a lost cat; not being invited to a party; taking a granddaughter to a carnival. The lines of defense are the lines of the verse itself, as poetry forms a stronghold against mortality. This essential volume showcases a poet writing at the height of his powers.
From “Before We Leave”:
Where are we going?
It’s not an issue of here or there.
And if you ever feel you can’t
take another step, imagine
how you might feel to arrive,
if not wiser, a little more aware
how to inhabit the middle ground
between misery and joy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his 17th collection, Pulitzer-winner Dunn (Different Hours) navigates the social and moral boundaries of middle-class life with a weary eye and penchant for giving wavering advice. His distance from youth, when "a leather jacket helped for some,/ and for others a neckline that promised/ a descent into a dreamland," is sharply highlighted, contrasting with a present when "every day, if I could,/ I'd oppose history by altering one detail." Echoes of love affairs, professional and personal jousts, and a recurring uncertainty as to the rightness of one's path inform a stark ambiguity in the speaker's relationship to his own life's story. Dunn has a sorrowful take on mortality, and he rails against the life's cruelties: "My brother is talking about his ice maker/ because a man can't talk about his lymphoma/ and chemo every minute of the day." What Dunn ultimately bets big on (in addition to the Jets-Patriots game), is the ability of language to recount, heal, and even recreate: "Only when his son spoke,/ measuring with precise, slow-/ to-arrive language the father/ he had lost, did something in me move./ There was my brother restored,/ abstracted, made of words now."
