Lines of Defense

by Stephen Dunn

Overview

“[Stephen Dunn] has taken his place among our major, indispensable poets.”—Miami Herald

In his seventeenth collection of poetry, Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn confronts the lines we fight against and the ones we draw for ourselves. Lines of Defense poignantly captures the absurdities of modern life, expectations derailed, the lived life juxtaposed to the imagined life, and the defenses we don to make do. The poems in Lines of Defense are wry and elegiac, precisely observed and wide-reaching. As with the best of Dunn’s work, they take stock of the quotidian aspects of life, of the essential comedy of getting through the day: finding a lost cat; not being invited to a party; taking a granddaughter to a carnival. The lines of defense are the lines of the verse itself, as poetry forms a stronghold against mortality. This essential volume showcases a poet writing at the height of his powers.

From “Before We Leave”:

Where are we going?
It’s not an issue of here or there.
And if you ever feel you can’t
take another step, imagine
how you might feel to arrive,
if not wiser, a little more aware
how to inhabit the middle ground
between misery and joy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393242751
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	12/31/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	372 KB

About the Author

Stephen Dunn (1939–2021) was the author of nineteen poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Different Hours. He was a distinguished professor emeritus at Richard Stockton University and received an Academy Award in Literature, among many other honors.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 11

I

It Was a Time 15

Before We Leave 16

The Country of the Next Thing 18

Tracks 19

Cleaning Up 21

Thank You 23

Nothing to Hold Onto 25

Something Needed To Be Done 27

Now, Finally 30

Anniversary Poem 32

Intrusions 33

Betty Friedan's Final Advice 35

In Love, His Grammar Grew 37

Formalities for the Long Road 38

II

If The Poet 43

III

The Little Details 47

Those Without Final Residence 48

Reconstruction 50

Archaeology 52

Another Argument with Jim About the Soul 53

Their Loneliness 55

The Chicken and the Egg 57

Delicacies 58

Testimony 60

The Man With Three Horses 61

Old Past, Near Past 63

Pedagogical 65

For My Son 66

Out of Respect 67

Feathers 68

IV

A Coldness 73

Letter to the Man I Once Was 75

The Party to Which You Are Not Invited 77

The Proliferation 79

Maggie and the Gauchos 81

The Widening 83

Odds Are 86

The obvious 87

Ache 88

For the Player 89

In Another Country 91

The Statue of Responsibility 92

Sea Level 94

Editorial Reviews

02/03/2014
In his 17th collection, Pulitzer-winner Dunn (Different Hours) navigates the social and moral boundaries of middle-class life with a weary eye and penchant for giving wavering advice. His distance from youth, when “a leather jacket helped for some,/ and for others a neckline that promised/ a descent into a dreamland,” is sharply highlighted, contrasting with a present when “every day, if I could,/ I’d oppose history by altering one detail.” Echoes of love affairs, professional and personal jousts, and a recurring uncertainty as to the rightness of one’s path inform a stark ambiguity in the speaker’s relationship to his own life’s story. Dunn has a sorrowful take on mortality, and he rails against the life’s cruelties: “My brother is talking about his ice maker/ because a man can’t talk about his lymphoma/ and chemo every minute of the day.” What Dunn ultimately bets big on (in addition to the Jets-Patriots game), is the ability of language to recount, heal, and even recreate: “Only when his son spoke,/ measuring with precise, slow-/ to-arrive language the father/ he had lost, did something in me move./ There was my brother restored,/ abstracted, made of words now.” (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"Over a lifetime richly invested in poetry, Dunn has mastered his signature take on an artfully colloquial voice that, in the guise of plainspeaking, slyly lampoons our daily pretensions, tenderly empathizes with our daily disappointments, and reminds us that the day-to-day can serve as the gateway to otherness. Lines of Defense is an admirable addition to that life-work, its difficult honesties and wrestlings with conscience lurking under beckoningly, entertainingly casual surfaces."

Albert Goldbarth

"Stephen Dunn’s newest poems—retrospective, elegiac, comic, quotidian, tactful, and transcendent—true the self’s comprehensions of its own stories as a sawyer’s jig, file, and hammer true a saw, yet without ever sacrificing tenderness for sharpness (or the reverse). Lines of Defense reconfirms Dunn’s long-held place as one of our most necessary American poets: if he did not exist, we would have to invent him. But—what luck— exist he does."

Jane Hirshfield

"Stephen Dunn’s fresh batch of poems teaches us that ‘to tell’ is just as good as ‘to show’ if you have something worth telling. These are smart, forceful, meticulously spoken poems that tell us some vital truths about how to conduct our lives."

Billy Collins