New & Selected Poems 1974-1994

by Stephen Dunn

Sixteen new poems and poems selected from the author's previous collections focus on the nuances of family and domestic life, as well as philosophical and metaphysical concerns

Genres: Poetry, Literary Fiction

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Stephen Dunn was born in New York City in 1939. He earned a B.A. in history and English from Hofstra University, attended the New School Writing Workshops, and finished his M.A. in creative writing at Syracuse University. Dunn has worked as a professional basketball player, an advertising copywriter, and an editor, as well as a professor of creative writing.

Dunn's books of poetry include Everything Else in the World (W. W. Norton, 2006); Local Visitations (2003); Different Hours (2000), winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry; Loosestrife (1996); New and Selected Poems: 1974-1994 (1994); Landscape at the End of the Century (1991); Between Angels (1989); Local Time (1986), winner of the National Poetry Series; Not Dancing (1984); Work & Love (1981); A Circus of Needs (1978); Full of Lust and Good Usage (1976); and Looking For Holes In the Ceiling 1974. He is also the author of Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry (BOA Editions, 2001), and Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs (1998).

Dunn's other honors include the Academy Award for Literature, the James Wright Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He has taught poetry and creative writing and held residencies at Wartburg College, Wichita State University, Columbia University, University of Washington, Syracuse University, Southwest Minnesota State College, Princeton University, and University of Michigan. Dunn is currently Richard Stockton College of New Jersey Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and lives in Port Republic, New Jersey.

Reviews

[Tammy Marie Jacintho · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like to immerse myself in an artist's work. It's always best to read three or four books by the same author at the same time. This way, one becomes comfortable with a particular vision or voice. Reading all of Charles Dickens or all of Jane Austen is thrilling because their worlds become yours, and for a little while, at least, the small island of familiarity these words create are relatives-- a kind of warmth overtakes you-- and these words of brilliance have a way of codling the self unlike any other.

This book is a great companion piece to Dunn’s essays. He salvages regret and loss and pathos—transforms those moments past, and re-imagines his interior in such a way that he redeems it all.

After reading his work, I wish to become sensitive, to live "close to the bone" and to have the courage to look back.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The reason I dropped out of the music business,
for five years,
and started writing poetry exclusively.

I'm now back to writing and performing music as well...

but, I've written a poem a day for the last thirteen years,
and this book is a huge part of the reason why...

[Xe Sands · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most extraordinary collection of poetry I've ever come across. Dunn pulls no punches and offers no comfort along with his words, other than what is inherent in them and the experience itself.

Oh, and no rhyming. And I love him just *that* much more because of it.

[Michelle Hartman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This author was recommend at a workshop on poetry writing. This particular book is a great choice in that it's taken from several books, so you are more like to find a style of poetry or topic here, than you would in a regular book following one topic or style. A good addition to a well developed poetry library.

[Ed Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't really seek out poetry collections, so when a friend forwarded this one to me, I took it as an opportunity to sharpen my poetry chops. It's good. Like if Bukowski had a PhD in literature. If nothing else, reading the whole thing was worth it just for this line: "I know I'm just another slug / in the yard." Oh, man. You and me both. :/

[Hannah Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Favorite poems and lines:

The Snowmass Cycle #7 - "Somewhere in the world is the secret name for God"

"I've noticed the wind doesn't discriminate between sycamore and cypress."

How to Be Happy: Another Memo to Myself - "You start with your own body then move outward, but not too far. Never try to please a city, for example...A woman is a beginning. She need not be pretty, but must know how to make her own ceilings out of all that's beautiful in her"

"In large groups, create a corner in the middle of a room."

That Saturday Without a Car (about his mom) - "her heart was the best and worst of her - every kindness fought its way through damage, her breasts disappeared as if the heart itself, for comfort, had sucked them in."

[Mike Hammer · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is the 2nd or 3rd time i have read this collection since i got it
before going to see stephen dunn give a reading at bgsu
this collection is powerful touching smart and sassy at points
but mostly is a book of observational poems of life that most of us can probably identify with
pick it up and enjoy it

all stephen dunns stuff is great

[Lucio · Rating 4 out of 5]

For those who were taught to fear poetry in highschool: Ol' Stevie gives it to you straight, pretty prosy, and sneaks a few gems the satchel when you're not looking. My anthem: "What They Wanted"

[Corin · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I praise how the body heals itself.
I praise how, finally, it never learns."

-Stephen Dunn, "Desire"

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back in 2016, I received a poem by Stephen Dunn in a newsletter from the Poetry Foundation. I was stunned by it and remembered it year after year, returning to it regularly, making a mental note to pursue this poet more seriously.

That being said, what a chance encounter Dunn was. As was Gombrowicz at the library when I was 17, just turned around and saw his diary on the shelf, it seemed to me like a sensible thing to do, take it home and devour it. What a grand gift it is for a teenager to find Gombrowicz, similar to a disenchanted adult with an untainted love for word reflected truths to discover Dunn's poetry.

I feel compelled to say a few words that are able to express on some level the essence of these poems, challenging as this task is. Reading Dunn feels like there's no barrier between your consciousness and his, as if he were speaking from the root of human experience, speaking about realities and nuances so ethereal, so barely there that sometimes you double-check to see if the words did not scare them off the page. But they never do, Dunn aims and pins them down with a firm yet loving hand, and a cheeky smile represented by masterfully crafted meta-references. On every page, he transcends the text. This is probably one of the reasons why this reading experience is so very extraordinary. Beyond writing poetry, Dunn finds a way to communicate his truths without textually betraying them. This supremely rare ability and auctorial aim always triggered in me a jaw-dropping experience, not the kind where you jump up and down and go aaaaaaa (blessed be those moments too), but rather the one where you close the book and stare deeply into yourself with a singular sense of recognition, thinking - yes, this.

If an alien would ask me what it's like to be human, I'd hand them this book. Hell, if humans asked me, I'd answer the same. Dunn's ability to express and craft an artifact so natural in its appearance, reflecting the limitations, the emotions, the strange and blurry motions of the human mind and heart is an unexpected gift to be received in adulthood with awe and a joyful sense of disbelief.

Dunn is a very powerful ally and his expressed desire to connect from behind the page with the reader, not courting him in traditional ways, but rather pulling him into the poem, building him into his verse is another outstanding aspect of this dialogue seeking poetry.

In many ways, Dunn is the perfect embodiment of what I always thought a real poet to be: someone who dives into the mire of reality and emerges to report his findings filtered through his own sensibility, representative of his own color spectrum. Someone who seeks and finds a language so close to experience that its intimacy is seamlessly conveyed to the reader. Someone who, despite what the ancients thought, peels the treacherous layers off of words and makes them expose the nature of who we are. The wreck and not the story of the wreck.

Dunn could have got away with so much less. So many poets get away with infinitely less and I don't even mean the bad ones. Yet his commitment does not seem to be to doggedness, to ego, to performance. Dunn is an explorer who goes as far as one can possibly go, paving his own road, letting his distinctive voice emerge onto the page. He seems to have got the drive of the mountain climber to see, to experience, to know, to achieve internally, and most importantly, to tread where others do not. Out of this willingness to look in remote yet familiar places, out of a no-nonsense straightforwardness with himself, a very particular form of sincerity is poured into his words. A sincerity aware of its limits, aware of its flaws, and its betrayals - thus an utterly convincing one.

I wish I had read this book a bit earlier so I could think to myself that I live and breathe in the same world as Dunn. That would have provided me with so much comfort. Since Cohen died, I have had nobody to take over this task in my imagination. Unfortunately, Dunn also departed this summer, may he not rest in peace and somehow in some way continue poking us with his x-ray vision and effortless means of expression. Speaking of which, a new book of poetry is announced for next year.

What a grand thing to look forward to, what pure joy of anticipation, what a time to be alive.

[Alarie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been a fan of Dunn’s poems for years. Sadly, he died in June 2021. He was as amazingly prolific as he was insightful and entertaining. However, I found nearly 300 pages in one volume to be a bit overwhelming. His variety in tone and topic is enough to keep a poetry lover engaged, but this collection includes his best work from eight volumes with newer poems (still before 1995) at the beginning. Don’t get me wrong, I remained delighted in the reading, but the poems cover so many topics, tones, and stages of life that I’m at a loss how to characterize his writing. Most of my favorite poets write accessibly, cover a broad range of emotion, often include some humor even in life’s rough spots, but most of all, leave me with that “wish I’d said that” awe throughout a book, or in this case 8+ books. All boxes checked for Dunn, plus it’s hard to accomplish all those tasks without creating some killer metaphors.

What I do like about a poetry book that covers several decades of an author’s life is watching how they change. Most get better with age. I feel sorry for those who don’t, who get stuck in a rut or stuck on themselves. If anything, I’d say Dunn was amazingly consistent, but I enjoyed the later poems a bit more because he was less self-conscious, more willing to look beyond himself and stop pitying himself.

For those wanting to know what to find in Dunn’s work, the best I can do I share a few favorite excerpts.

No doubt a Freudian slip, misread, or malapropism has led a poet to say something more interesting. From new poems (i.e., from 1991-94), “A Petty Thing.”

“An early frost, and a lone cricket
rubbing his forelegs together, slowly now,
a minor, somewhat courageous sound
in my heartless room…
I mean heatless, heartless was a slip,
a betrayal really, of the mind….
The temperature is falling. Night already
has fallen, which is inexact.
Night has come laterally
out of the woods, has risen from the grass.
Everything shy about me loves it,
everything criminal, too….”

From “Beautiful Women,”

“ Intelligence warmed by generosity
is inner beauty, and what’s worse
some physically beautiful women have it,
and we have to be strapped and handcuffed
to the mast, or be ruined….”


Both the title and concept of this poem would make an excellent writing exercise – from Looking for Holes in the Ceiling (1974).


“Biography in the First Person

This is not the way I am.
Really, I am much taller in person,
the hairline I conceal reaches back
to my grandfather, and the shyness my wife
will not believe in has always been why
I was bold on first dates…”


From A Circus of Need(1978),

“The Man Who Never Loses His Balance

He walks the high wire in his sleep.
The tent is blue, it is perpetual
afternoon. He is walking between
the open legs of his mother
and the grave. Always. The audience
is fathers whose kites are lost, children
who want to be terrified into joy….”

[Lucas Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Been struggling through this for awhile and am going to call it. I read the first half with great intensity and then have dipped into the second half with modest enjoyment. I saw Dunn read at Baylor in 2011 and it was an important experience. I love his 21st century output. The collection that have meant the most to me are from his last two decades. The wistfulness, wisdom, and his flirtation with nostalgia (while ultimate recognizing its traps) are beautiful. The earlier poems can be weirdly cringy to me. Especially the writing about sex in the 70s. The poems on more domestic topics from the 80s and 90s, marriage, children, aging parents, mid-life reflections on childhood begin to capture the elements of his later work that are so important to me, but on the whole I don't find these decades as compelling. Dunn was a great and underrated American poet, but I think I'm just a diehard fan of his later work. This is good, and I will revisit it, but not as often as his other collections.

[Victoria Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read enough of his poems to say I like this poet. Direct, not my most favorite writing style, but undeniably good. If I started out with more contemporary poets, I'd probably like him even more, but I got my start with Keats and Whitman, so that put me on another track. Personally, I'm happy it worked out that way. Dunn is very good, but lots of poets these days have no clue about writing good poems. I, too, can put words on a page in the shape of a poem, but it takes a lot more than that, people.

[Stephen Lamb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first time I've read a collection like this in a week, and it was fun to get a big picture perspective of a poet I admire. The first 100 pages or so kept reminding me of a David Bazan lyric -- "Another young man tells his story / Before his heart is even broken one time / Like a stand-up who forgets his punchlines" -- but many of the poems in the last two-thirds of the collection were rich with moving and thought-provoking images and ideas.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephen Dunn is an established poet who has been writing for while, but was new to me. Now he's one of my favorites! The nice thing about the 2 decade range of this collection is that you can literally read through the development of his style, his thought, his subjects. It is a delightful trip.

[Nathan Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

It does not get any better than this in terms of contemporary poetry. Suggested to me by a friend, Dunn's poetry is both scintillating and unpretentious.

[Jacqueline Bussie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A completely marvelous book of poetry

[Michael Fleming · Rating 5 out of 5]

not ordinary

Just a sensational read. Critics called him the poet of the ordinary. If this is ordinary let’s have more of it. A scalpel eye that turns dross into gold.

[Galen Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

Iconic collection, lots of stand outs including sweetness which I’ve loved for forever. The last poem really hit tho

[Rosa]

“Rumaki.”

[Lauren Tennet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poems devastating in their everyday and everyman-ness.

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

i am still "currently reading" this (not that i ever classified this in goodreads under "currently reading," because in a way one is always "currently reading" poetry, so i don't know, i just don't know) but i feel like i am able to "review" this anyway.
i am doing what my poetry teacher from camp last year said she always did with books of poetry; i've been flipping to random pages, reading backwards, reading forwards, reading in small sequences. i have read some poems in here five times, some poems three, some poems once; some poems i have not yet read at all. this method comes especially in handy for this book, which is nearly three hundred pages.
i'm still not sure how to "review" poetry when the reason the poetry exists is to speak itself. literature, poetry especially, always comes off as a sort of review of life to me. here is what you are doing. here is what you have done. here is what i wish you had done better. here is what you could do better. maybe that i am writing all this in particular after reading poems and poems by stephen dunn is the review—i mean, yes, of course it is.
stephen dunn writes in his poem "not the occult":
'I've always been drawn
to such ordinary mysteries, women
and men, the broken bridge
between us.'

(this explains much of his oeuvre.) and later on in the poem:

'It's not the occult
and those obvious stakes
in the heart
that makes me wonder.
And I confess
I have trouble speaking to people
fond of outer space.
I don't like riddles.'

basically, stephen dunn is arranging your life into verses, which doesn't mean he's making it neat, or explainable, or at least not in a conventional manner. it's okay if you don't like him, i guess, in the same way that it's okay if you don't like anything.
the cover features a painting by cezanne, whose still lifes weren't about the objects featured in the still life—the bread, the fruit—but about the visual experience of the objects. about seeing them. so these paintings about external unrelated objects are very internal, very personal. this makes a lot of sense, in relation.

here is a poem in full. it is called "beneath the sidewalk" and, though i like it, it is nowhere near my favorite, but i have probably randomly flipped to it, page fifty-one, the most, for some chaotic reason, and that felt like reason enough to show it here (and because it's short):

Whispers collect there, the bad news
from our subconscious,
tears that have dripped down
the inside of faces,
apologies that have gotten lost
in all of our throats.

So much has been held in,
so much has seeped through
the soles of our shoes,
that half our lives are beneath the sidewalk.
We sense the deep riot
that is always going on.

In spring there are small explosions.
Signs. This is why
the sidewalk must be repaved.
We hire someone to do it for us,
our tight bodies watching from windows.

[Nara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sweetness

Just when it has seemed I couldn't bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn't leave a stain,
no sweetness that's ever sufficiently sweet...

Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don't care

where it's been, or what bitter road
it's traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.

[Doreen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stephen Dunn's Different Hours is one of my favorite books of all time, a collection so gorgeous that, for once, I didn't quibble with the Pulitzer jury's decision to award it their poetry prize (though, tbh, I don't usually quibble with the poetry award. It's the fiction one that constantly rouses my ire.) Since then, I've compulsively collected his works when I've come across them. This volume was the first of his earlier poems that I've read, and... oh dear, how to put this. Let's just say that his earlier stuff doesn't have anywhere near the excellence of his later work. In fact, I pretty much disliked everything he wrote up till Work And Love, except for the very last poem included here that predates that but which title I cannot remember and am too lazy to go upstairs to retrieve. Anyway, the poems get better -- less self-absorbed, more expansive -- till hitting a glorious climax in the rollicking Loves, which only hints at the brilliance and warmth to come. This collection is good for the completist, but hardly essential otherwise.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stand in awe of the artistry of Stephen Dunn. His poems enlighten with truth and humor. I have many favorites in this bulky collection, most of which come from his earlier work. The new poems in this collection didn't stand out to me. Favorite poems include:

The Woman with Five Hearts, Decorum, Biography in the First Person, How to Be Happy, A Primer for Swimming at Black Point, The Photograph Album, In a Dream of Horses, The Worrier, The Routine Things Around the House, Eggs, At the Smithville Methodist Church, Loneliness, Mon Semblable, To a Terrorist, Regardless, A Secret Life, Loves

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd give it 4.5 stars if I could. Dunn's meditative poems (often narrative, though sometimes lyric) are ones I could read again and again. It took me a few months to finish this book because I wanted to savor it, so I allowed myself a few poems each night before I went to bed. It's a book I want to loan out to friends to read--but I won't be able to for awhile because I have to have it close by, just in case.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephen Dunn's 2000 collection Different Hours won the Pulitizer Prize for poetry with good reason. This collection, gathering much of his work, prior to that time shows the development of one of our best contemporary poets. An amazing collection that brings the personal and philosophical together through beautiful language.

[Tracy O · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't love all of the poems in this book (that's reserved for the land of Li Young Lee and Naomi Shihab Nye I think), BUT the poems I liked, I really liked. "Mon Semblable," "From the Manifesto of the Selfish," and "A Secret Life," are my favorites.

"Each From Different Heights," I liked if only for the line, "I'm astounded by the various types of kisses we're capable of."

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

On a sunny day last summer, lying on a picnic blanket after a bunch of us went skinny dipping in Bass Lake, people took turns reading Dunn's amazing poems. What a perfect introduction to a brilliant poet! "In France, where life and theory / touch now and then, / I don't doubt your pleasures. But here / there's room enough for incorrect / behavior, which some of us plan on."

[Melanie Faith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every now and again I run across a poetry book at random that fits. This book, today, is it. :) Beautiful and varied narrative poems. My favorites, so far, are: "Urgencies," "Mon Semblable," "Loveliness," and "Each from Different Heights." I'd not read much Steven Dunn, but I'm enjoying many of these. Writing again, too--which is always a good test of a work for me.