Synopses & Reviews
Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, the winner of the National Book Award, presents the life work of a giant of American letters, tracks a forty-year career of honest, tough artistry, and shows a man at nearly 80 years of age and still at the height of his poetic power. Dugans new poems continue his career-long concerns with renewed vigor: the poets insistence that art is a grounded practice threatened by pretension, the wry wit, the jibes at the academic and sententious, and the arresting observations on the quotidian battles of life. All the while he peppers his poems with humorous images of the grim and daunting topics of existential emptiness.
Synopsis
This is the only collection of Dugan's poetry in print, chronicling a 40-year career and its shifting concerns. Here Alan Dugan adds to his body of work with nearly three dozen new poems. Eloquent, blunt, funny, or bitter, the poet, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Prix de Rome, comments on every facet of life. As Stanley Plumly noted when presenting the 2001 National Book Award for Poems Seven: [Dugans] crucial honesty as much as his resolute art is irresistible.
Synopsis
This monumental collection tracks a forty-year career of honest, tough artistry, and shows an eighty-year-old at the height of his poetic power, affirming with renewed vigor that art is a grounded practice with no room for pretension.
About the Author
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.