Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Despite the sweeping title, Dunn's 14th collection stays close to home and true to form, engaging his personal history and ideas with straightforward intelligence, simple language and dry humor. The danger in these poems lawlessness, heartbreak, violence is mostly at the margins, in the past, read about or amusingly harmless, as when a tornado takes a barn but leaves the house and its poker chips so the game can continue. Exploring and explicating previous states of mind is one of Dunn's central concerns, often with the knowledge that nothing can "undo what's been done." Of an adulterer whose marriage sours, he asks the reader, "Can you say you're not envious... ?" When there's not enough wit or surprise, Dunn's abstractions and plain tone weigh down his lines. Elsewhere, however, he achieves a "quieter music" that accompanies the realization that "you've only just begun / to know how you feel." (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
With his 14th collection, Pulitzer Prize winner Dunn (Different Hours) has made a good case for his significance, if not just for accepting his "small part in the great comedy." Dunn has always been as concerned with the big picture-redemption, salvation, spirituality-as with the more common issues of love, family, and social civility. His poems are filled with smart-thinking, clearheaded consideration as he looks closely at things-at the mistyped phrase ("She pressed her lips to mind"); at the missing comma on a highway warning sign ("Slow Children"). There is crisp humor and always more than a little common sense in his poems. And there is music: "We took out our fiddles and fiddled/ as if moon-driven, sang as if daft./ We did it because that was what we did/ when there seemed nothing left to do./ But in the doing we made music/ that felt necessary and ours." Dunn is one of our soundest commodities. Significant without a doubt, his book is essential to contemporary poetry collections.-Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
