Local Visitations: Poems

As always, this collection of Dunn's is enlightening and rewarding. He's our best living American poet...

Local Visitations is a selection of free-verse poetry by Pulitzer prize-winner Stephen Dunn. Elegant and brief, these poems study the foibles of heroes who are only human. The Animals of America: The animals have come down from the hills/and through the forests and across the prairies./They are American animals, and carry with them/a history of their slaughter. There's not one/who doesn't sleep with an eye open.//Our of necessity the small have banded/with the large, the large with the large/of different species. When dark comes/they form an enormous circle.//It's all, after years of night-whispers/and long-range cries, coming together.//To make a new world the American animals/know there must be sacrifices. Every evening/a prayer is said for the spies who've volunteered/to be petted in the houses of the enemy./"They are savages," one reported,/"Let no one be fooled by their capacity for loving."

Opening with a playful and vivid poem, "Bowl Of Fruit" that, as always with Stephen Dunn, weaves its way confidently from bananas and oranges to yet another poignant and sincere statement on desire, Dunn's 12th book of poems revises familiar themes with an eye more towards celebration than despair. Dunn hints of a Blake gone fiendish in lines such as "But surely by now you've come to realize/there is no worm, only this bowl of fruit/made of words, only these seductions." For a second, at least, the famed "invisible worm" of Blake's "The Sick Rose" is kept at bay in favor of the world's fleeting but "seductive" pleasures; a rather drastic change of tone from the almost ceaseless morbidity that characterized Dunn's previous volume, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Different Hours. However, Dunn is hardly about to recant much of his past 11 collections of warnings in verse against the illusion of happiness, as in the wickedly enjambed poem, "Circular": "a belief in happiness bred/despair, though despair could be assuaged/by belief, which required faith . . . and best to have music/to sweeten a sadness, underscore joy." Despite Dunn's urge towards life's morose truths, though, images of a modern-day Sisyphus daring a smile in the midst of his punishment, "a smile so inward it cannot be seen," and notions such as "at the bottom of depression, says James Hollis/is some meaningful task waiting to be found" suggest that Local Visitations is a kind of reconciliation with the harrowing blues of Different Hours.If Different Hours advised against desire's inevitably painful temptations, many poems in Local Visitations transcend caution and despair in favor of delight and wonder. "The problem is how to look intelligent/with our mouths agape/how to be delighted, not stupefied/when the caterpillar shrugs and becomes a butterfly," Dunn avers in "Knowledge." If life's grander pleasures fail us, perhaps we might turn, instead, to its smaller joys. If the human being is doomed to fallibility, perhaps we might learn "how to love amid the encroachments," as Dunn suggests in his uniquely poignant plainspokenness.But if, after so many books of thwarted longing, Dunn's observations on "how boring sorrows are" is not enough of a refreshment to his seasoned readers, then the playful, imaginative and engaging section of poems in which he escorts a cadre of famous authors through the landscape of his Native New Jersey serves as a remarkable new dimension to Dunn's distinctive and persistent voice. "Because the famous usually have little to say/to each other after the first paeans of praise," Dunn explains, "the poet thought that for their own sakes/he'd have them live in separate towns." Pivoting off of this introductory poem, Dunn leaps into a succession of poems with titles such as "Chekhov in Port Republic," "Charlotte Bronte in Leeds Point," "George Eliot in Beach Haven," and "Twain in Atlantic City." With his imagination tuned to a fever pitch, these particular poems read li