The Insistence of Beauty: Poems

Rating:
Summary: "Insistence" of Beautiful Poems
Review: Dunn's incisive, gorgeous gifts for entering the uncertain landscapes of living have never felt laid so bare as they do in "Insistence of Beauty" or so very fearless. From poems that explore Achilles exposing his heels for the cause of love, or results of the `grudges' endemic to the human condition, or whether certain stories become ours to tell if they come to us through our beloved, to poems amazed that love seems to have a life all its own - how we carry on with the weight and loveliness of it, in spite of circumstance. There is nothing predictable about this book. The speakers of the poems seem as astonished and even as bewildered as any of us that life and beauty insist past what we believe cannot or should not be endured. That we become more and less than we ever thought possible. In a previous collection, Dunn's poem "Walking the Marshland" finishes "Praise refuge I thought, praise whatever you can." Rescue dogs and their handlers, feeling the full measures of awkwardness and self-interest beside grace and the pain of another, all of this is reason for praise - no matter how unsettling it all seems.

Rating:
Summary: A Big Disappointment
Review: S.Dunn's world seems to have shrunk to the size of a walnut since he won the Pulitzer Prize. The poems in this new collection lack oxygen. They are without energy, without spark. Even thinking about the 9/11 tragedy fails to energize Dunn's self-absorbing mumblings.

The old saying is true: "A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package."