What Goes On: Selected and New Poems 1995-2009

Brilliant new poems and an expansive gathering from six collections by a Pulitzer Prize winner celebrated as "indispensable."

"Good poems are triumphs over the unlikely," Stephen Dunn says. "They make us pay attention in new ways." In his second new and selected collection, Dunn subtly enlarges our sense of possibility. His new poems, suffused with affection and rue for our world, occasionally address the metaphysical, as in these lines from "Talk to God" —

Ease into your misgivings
Ask him if in his weakness
he was ever responsible
for a pettiness — some weather, say,
brought in to show who's boss
when no one seemed sufficiently moved
by a sunset or the shape of an egg.
Ask him if when he gave us desire
he had underestimated its power.

What Goes On displays the evolving style and sensibility of a major award-winning poet, and a traceable growth that has blossomed into a provocative confrontation with questions of consciousness and existence. Stephen Dunn's poems probe life's big questions without ever losing sight of the significance of the mundane.

What Goes On displays the evolving style and sensibility of a major award-winning poet, and a traceable growth that has blossomed into a provocative confrontation with questions of consciousness and existence. Stephen Dunn's poems probe life's big questions without ever losing sight of the significance of the mundane.

Stephen Dunn, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Different Hours, lives in Frostburg, Maryland.