Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry

(Hardback)

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This volume presents the life work of a giant of American letters. This monumental collection, which includes 35 new poems, belongs on the shell of the great literature of post-World War II America. It tracks a 40-year career of honest, tough artistry, and shows a man at nearly 80 years of age still at the height of his poetic power. Dugan's new poems continue his career-long concerns with renewed vigour, and he peppers his arresting observations and wry wit with humorous images of the grim and daunting topics of existential emptiness.

Reviews

The teller of these awkward truths has a role that could be called sacred Dugan's remarkable achievement is to see into mean or mundane materials with all the profundity and force of poetry. Robert Pinsky,The New York Times Book Review

[These poems'] magic derives from Dugan's ability to foreground the small, immediate detail, while lifting our eyes to something just beyond it. The New Yorker

Eloquent or blunt, sometimes baffling, funny or bitter, philosophical or curiously observant, [Dugan's poems] probe every part of life. Boston Globe

Deeply American in his manners, [Dugan] is the American other Americans are uneasy with. ... What separates him from, and elevates him above, other sly saboteurs and bitter enemies of posturing is the depth of his intelligence. Louise Glck,Threepenny Review

[Dugan's] poems are spare, quirky, fierce, unconcessive, grudging, loving, and terribly real. Stanley Kunitz

What you're holding in your hands is a monument, the lifetime trace of a mind wrangling with experience, setting down the truth in no uncertain terms. Dugan's a master. Louise Bogan

Author Bio

ALAN DUGANs first book, Poems, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. Dugan has won the National Book Award (twice), the Pulitzer Prize, the Prix de Rome, and an award in literature from the American Academy and the Institute of Arts and Letters. He has been a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, the recipient of two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, and a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. He died in 2003.