Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry
by Alan Dugan
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In this complete collection that tracks his 40-year career and its shifting concerns, Alan Dugan adds to his legend with nearly three dozen new poems. Dugan spent World War II in the Army Air Corps, and several of his early poems are wry testaments to the somber business of modern warfare. Others plumb the depths of existential angst with bracing black humor and brio. Poems Seven: New & Complete Poetry presents the life work of a giant of American letters: this monumental collection, which show more includes 35 new poems, belongs on the shelf of the great literature of post-World War II America. It tracks a forty-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 vigor: the poet's 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. show lessTags
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I bought this book in hardcover, when it came out in 2001, at the now-defunct Tudor Bookshop, and I've been pecking away at it intermittently in the long, crazy decade since. Poems Seven was a revelation to me then, and a pleasure to revisit now: Dugan's poetry has swagger and bite, a caustic energy that appealed to a younger, more uncertain version of myself and that remains bracing and enjoyable today, even though I can perceive now its limitations. A drinker and womanizer, a formerly low-level Madison Avenue adman and roustabout, a cantakerous Marxist lover of the classics, Dugan's poetry bristles with profanity, sex, and the violence of the world. If it can be said that his prosody did not vary much of the course of his long career show more -- he consistently produces short lyrics in jagged bursts of free verse, with sardonic titles -- it must also be said that his voice was genuinely distinctive, an expression of an echt American original. show less
Alan Dugan's poems scour off the sentiment and leave your bones gleaming. How has he stayed so loyal to actual? Obviously, it hasn't been easy.
Alan Dugan is blunt, honest and direct. His poems are remarkable.
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10+ Works 286 Members
The Saturday Review said of Poems (1961), the first volume by the native New Yorker Alan Dugan: "His poetry is a special way of looking at things. . . . Through personal experience of war he shapes universal messages, while he takes history, religion, and mythology and gives them an intimate meaning." This book won the National Book Award and the show more Pulitzer Prize in 1962, and in the same year the poet won a fellowship in literature at the American Academy in Rome. The New York Times found that in Poems 2 (1963), Dugan reveals "a sharp eye for the sights and sounds of New York." In Poems 3, Dugan "writes with an anger at society that moves from artless outcry to black resignation in the face of the world's evils, and back again" (Saturday Review). (Bowker Author Biography) Alan Dugan's first book, "Poems" was chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets & won its grand prize. Each subsequent book has been simply titled in sequence: the current collection bringing us to "Poems Seven". He has won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Prix de Rome & an award in literature form the American Academy & the Institute of Arts & Letters. He has been a fellow of the National Academy in Rome, the recipient of two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships & a grant form the Rockefeller Foundation. Since 1969, the author has been affiliated with the Provincetown Find Arts Work Center in Provincetown & lives with his wife in Truro, Mass. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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