Here and Now: Poems

Here and Now: Poems

<p><strong>€œA wonderful example of the poet€s ability to satisfy readers and anticipate their thoughts.€€•Elizabeth Lund, <em>Washington Post</em></strong></p> In his sixteenth collection, Stephen Dunn continues to bring his imagination and intelligence to what Wallace Stevens calls €œthe problems of the normal,€ which of course pervade most of our lives. The poem €œDon€t Do That€ opens with the lines: €œIt was bring-your-own if you wanted anything / hard, so I brought Johnnie Walker Red / along with some resentment I€d held in / for a few weeks.€ In other poems, Dunn contemplates his own mortality, echoing Yeats€•€œThat is no country for old men / cadenced everything I said€€•only to discover he€s joined their ranks. In €œThe Writer of Nudes€ his speaker is in search of the body€s €œgrammar€ but tells his models, €œDon€t expect to see yourself as other / than I see you.€ Full of grace, wit, humor, and masterful precision, the poems in <em>Here and Now</em> attest to the contradictions we live with in the here and now. Political and metaphysical, these astonishing poems remind us of the essential human comedy of getting through each day.<br /><br /><em>from "The House on the Hill"<br /><br />       . . . from out of the fog,<br />       a large, welcoming house would emerge<br />       made out of invention and surprise.<br />       No things without ideas! you'd shout,<br />       and the doors would open,<br />       and the echoes would cascade down<br />       to the valleys and the faraway towns.</em>