Local Visitations: Poems
by Stephen Dunn
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 41)
Read in June, 2007
recommends it for:
Resurrected 18th century authors and people from South Jersey
As an avid New Jersey Partionialist and a South Jersey Patriot, I obviously love the last sequence of poems in Dunn's collection--"Local Visitations," for me at least, is poetry that is immediately recognizable and at the same time magically executed. For instance, anyone from South Jersey would recognize the cranberry bogs, the SJ towns like Wildwood, Egg Harbor, and even the degradation in the slums of Atlantic City , but we are experiencing it through the eyes of Dunn's 18th century...more
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I first came upon this poet--fortunate me!--at a reading a few years ago in Salt Lake City. This book is my favorite collection of his poems in my growing stack. The title comes from the last section of the book, where Mr. Dunn imagines the sudden and inexplicable return of several 19th Century novelists to specific towns in modern America. While the best poems in the collection are not found in this portion of the book, the idea nevertheless takes hold of the reader and even produces the very h...more
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Read in November, 2006
Dunn's Local Visitations resurrects some of the great 19th Century novelists (Poe, Dickens, Tolstoy, Eliot, Austen, and Twain, to name a few) in small, South Jersey towns. There, in typical Dunn fashion, we are led through psychological landscapes that reveal the simple joys and sorrows of 21st Century American life. In addition to this experimental section of the book, Dunn includes poems that explore Sisyphus, Blake, infidelity, and the death of God in a collection that, despite its over-ambit...more
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Read in January, 2007
The second half of this book is poetry about authors living in certain towns. The poems are great if you know anything about the lives of these (dead) authors. The first half of the book has some amazing poetry about Sisyphus and some poems I go back to over and over again.
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