The Insistence of Beauty: Poems

by Stephen Dunn

Book Overview

"Beauty isn't nice. Beauty isn't fair..." So, in part, states an epigraph for this stunning new collection, his thirteenth, by the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry (2000). First traversing betrayal and loss, Stephen Dunn then moves to speak of new love, with its attendant pleasures and questioning. The title poem, perhaps emblematic of the book as a whole, is evocative of beauty's often surprising manifestations--even in the light of tragedy--as on...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393059553
• ISBN13: 9780393059557
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

"Insistence" of Beautiful Poems

Dunn's incisive, gorgeous gifts for entering the uncertain landscapes of living have never felt laid so bare as they do in "Insistence of Beauty" or so very fearless. From poems that explore Achilles exposing his heels for the cause of love, or results of the `grudges' endemic to the human condition, or whether certain stories become ours to tell if they come to us through our beloved, to poems amazed that love seems to have a life all its own - how we carry on with the weight and loveliness of it, in spite of circumstance. There is nothing predictable about this book. The speakers of the poems seem as astonished and even as bewildered as any of us that life and beauty insist past what we believe cannot or should not be endured. That we become more and less than we ever thought possible. In a previous collection, Dunn's poem "Walking the Marshland" finishes "Praise refuge I thought, praise whatever you can." Rescue dogs and their handlers, feeling the full measures of awkwardness and self-interest beside grace and the pain of another, all of this is reason for praise - no matter how unsettling it all seems.