Local Visitations – Poems - Hardcover

Dunn, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393052001 ISBN 13: 9780393052008

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003

Synopsis

Wise and searching new poems from the winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. In his twelfth collection, his first since winning the Pulitzer Prize, Stephen Dunn turns his keen gaze on Sisyphus, our contemporary Everyman. Free, for the time being, from the power of the gods and the ceaseless weight of the rock, he struggles to navigate twenty-first-century America. In language by turns mordant and tender, often elegiac, Dunn illuminates the quotidian burdens of his all-too-human hero, as well as the abrasions of ambivalence and choice, finally concluding that "here / and there, though mostly here, even fate is reversible / with struggle or luck." In a second sequence of poems, nineteenth-century novelists become "local visitors" to the author's South Jersey towns. "Chekhov in Port Republic," "Jane Austen in Egg Harbor," "Dostoyevski in Wildwood": these inventions and others give Dunn provocative new latitudes. As in his previous books, "he balances the casual and the vivid as he plumbs the ambiguity and mystery of human relations" (New York Times Book Review).

About this title

Review

"Dunn's wit, command of language and form, and laser-sharp discernment of the human condition have never been keener."

Dunn's wit, command of language and form, and laser-sharp discernment of the human condition have never been keener. --Donna Seaman"

About the Author

Stephen Dunn is the author of sixteen poetry collections, including What Goes On: New and Selected Poems 1995-2009. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his collection Different Hours. He has also been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Frostburg, Maryland, with his wife, the writer Barbara Hurd.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393052001
• ISBN 13: 9780393052008
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80