Stephen Dunn

Different Hours

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

A wise and graceful new collection by one of our "major, indispensable poets" (Sidney Lea). Stephen Dunn, in his startling and graceful eleventh collection, often set in southern New Jersey where he makes his home, continues to find his subjects in the dailiness of life, at the same time expanding his vision to a darker emotional landscape. The mysteries of Eros and Thanatos, the stubborn endurance of mind and body in the face of diminishment-these are the undercurrents of Dunn's new work.

Dunn explores the 'different hours,' not only of one's life, but also of the larger historical and philosophical life beyond the personal, and brilliantly succeeds in getting at and plumbing our elusive realities.

"If it's wisdom that Stephen Dunn's poems are about—if that is the word for it—then wisdom is something a little different from what we might have supposed. It might be something we could only learn through a language like his, unbearably fearless and beautiful." —Gerald Stern

"With his unalterable earthbound grace, Stephen Dunn writes of the marriage of memory and desire under the canopy of mortality. With a seemingly easy, conversational music, composed of one exactly right word after another, Different Hours leads us down a trail of wisdom, teaching us to live like the poet, 'almost happily / in the despoiled and radiant now.' " —Alicia Suskin Ostriker

"The Art lies in hiding the art, Horace tells us, and Stephen Dunn has proven himself a master of concealment. His honesty would not be so forceful were it not for his discrete formality; his poems would not be so strikingly naked were they not so carefully dressed." —Billy Collins