Loosestrife: Poems

Stephen Dunn's wisdom and craft are once again on display in this new collection, his darkest and most brooding gaze into our lives to date. The poet's penetrating intelligence and mordant wit fixes on an America growing ever more stringent with its daily mercies, ever more withholding of daily opportunities for grace, for decency. In the title poem and in the book as a whole, Dunn doesn't merely observe the world, he is a participant - willing and unwilling; his stance is always dual, complicit. He navigates through each paradox and conundrum of his moral, aesthetic, and erotic selves, careful to steer between the extremes of certainty or confusion, and travels to a place of exact and complicated vision.

Dunn's new collection of poetry, the first since his New & Selected Poems 1974-1994, explores interior worlds of human loneliness and exterior worlds of Darwinian animal struggle. Broken relationships figure prominently in the human world, with a sense of loss that kills free will: "Everything was clear, and nothing much/the better for it./ They agreed it was a matter of caring,/ and each felt the dull courage that comes/ from caring less." With the animals, free will is absent anyway, and the savage realities come inevitably as instinct--as when a tiger cub raised by goats discovers its carnivorous and lethal nature. The common thread in many poems is the acknowledgment of a crushing determinism.