Pagan Virtues

November 18, 2019
In this 19th book, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Dunn (Different Hours) offers up the soul of a mature, solitary man who appreciates company, but who finds that love is, ultimately, “a better way to be alone.” The humble pagan virtues he upholds may be less flashy than religious ones, but they provide many “options,” such as “to uphold the beautiful// by renouncing the pretty.” Moving from instructions to his eulogist (“for accuracy you might say/ I often stopped,/ that I rarely went as far as I dreamed”) to the disenchantments of success, he advises the lucky to “try to settle in,/ take your place, however undeserved,/ among the fortunate.” The book’s center is the luxurious pit of “The Mrs. Cavendish Poems,” a sequence that moves through an affair with an unsettled, run-on address to the eponymous lady, plumbing the solipsism of its sorrow: “the sea doesn’t want to be bothered today,/ it merely wishes to behave like a lake/ reflect back a face it believes is its own.../ it would also like to change/ its salty ways, but like you,/ Mrs. Cavendish, it can’t.” Intimations of illness and age are carried forward with small steps of irony and courage in Dunn’s latest, moving work.

November 1, 2019
Dunn is the author of 19 poetry collections and a Pulitzer Prize winner, and in his latest affecting poems, he continues to scout the intrigues of the human condition. The title poem offers such exacting lines as, you can reexamine / everything that smells of dogma / or the forbidden, which reiterates this poet's sharp view of human strife. In another three-stanza poem, "An Education," Dunn writes of a gesture random / and accidental which plays a part in making dazzling nonsense, / sometimes just plain good sense. His poems draw one's attention to shared experiences, as in "A Good Life," a subtle poem suggesting that choosing love can, in the end, be all that matters: "It seems that time will undo everything, / though it's possible to be magnificent. The closing section, "The Mrs. Cavendish Poems," originally published as the chapbook Keeper of Limits: The Mrs. Cavendish Poems (2015), is a dazzling sequence that offers new insights each time it's read and reread.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)