Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, the winner of the National Book Award, presents the life work of a giant of American letters, tracks a forty-year career of honest, tough artistry, and shows a man at nearly 80 years of age and 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.
“The teller of these awkward truths has a role that could be called sacred … Dugan's remarkable achievement is to see into mean or mundane materials with all the profundity and force of poetry.” –Robert Pinsky, The New York Times Book Review
“[These poems'] magic derives from Dugan's ability to foreground the small, immediate detail, while lifting our eyes to something just beyond it.” –The New Yorker
“Eloquent or blunt, sometimes baffling, funny or bitter, philosophical or curiously observant, [Dugan's poems] probe every part of life.” –Boston Globe
“Deeply American in his manners, [Dugan] is the American other Americans are uneasy with. ... What separates him from, and elevates him above, other sly saboteurs and bitter enemies of posturing is the depth of his intelligence.” –Louise Glück, Threepenny Review
“[Dugan's] poems are spare, quirky, fierce, unconcessive, grudging, loving, and terribly real.” –Stanley Kunitz
“What you're holding in your hands is a monument, the lifetime trace of a mind wrangling with experience, setting down the truth in no uncertain terms. Dugan's a master.” –Louise Bogan
