Alan Dugan – författare

Comprised of ironic, unsentimental poems on subjects of everyday life, Poems is the 57th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets.  The first of seven books of poetry published during Dugan’s lifetime, Poems examines the unusual details of everyday subjects, including waterfalls, house plants, love, war, religion, and the Irish. Explorations inevitably arouse feelings of alienation, defeat, despair, and disenchantment. The poems are also marked by casual humor, mockery, and satire, which produce some of its strongest effects. The tone and style on display in this first book characterize all of Dugan’s subsequent poetry.

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.