Different Hours (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

by Stephen Dunn

Overview

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

A wise and graceful new collection by one of our "major, indispensable poets" (Sidney Lea). The mysteries of Eros and Thanatos, the stubborn endurance of mind and body in the face of diminishment—these are the undercurrents of Stephen Dunn's eleventh volume. "I am interested in exploring the 'different' hours," he says, "not only of one's life, but also of the larger historical and philosophical life beyond the personal."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393322323
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/17/2002
Edition description:	1 ED
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.40(d)

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.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Before the Sky Darkens

Sunsets, incipient storms, the tableaus
of melancholy—maybe these are
the Saturday night-events
to take your best girl to. At least then
there might be moments of vanishing beauty
before the sky darkens,
and the expectation of happiness
would hardly exist
and therefore might be possible.

More and more you learn to live
with the unacceptable.
You sense the ever-hidden God
retreating even farther,
terrified or embarrassed.
You might as well be a clown,
big silly clothes, no evidence of desire.

That's how you feel, say, on a Tuesday.
Then out of the daily wreckage
comes an invitation
with your name on it. Or more likely,
that best girl of yours offers you,
once again, a small local kindness.

You open your windows to good air
blowing in from who knows where,
which you gulp and deeply inhale
as if you have a death sentence. You have.
All your life, it seems, you've been appealing it.
Night sweats and useless strategem. Reprieves.

SIXTY

Because in my family the heart goes first
and hardly anybody makes it out of his fifties,
I think I'll stay up late with a few bandits
of my choice and resist good advice.
I'll invent a secret scroll lost by Egyptians
and reveal its contents: the directions
to your house, recipes for forgiveness.
History saysmyventricles are stone alleys,
my heart itself a city with a terrorist
holed up in the mayor's office.
I'm in the mood to punctuate
only with that maker of promises, the colon:
next, next, next, its says, God bless it.
As García Lorca may have written: some people
forget to live as if a great arsenic lobster
could fall on their heads at any moment.
My sixtieth birthday is tomorrow.
Come, play poker with me,
I want to be taken to the cleaners.
I've had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches.
A heart is to be spent. As for me, I'll share
my mulcher with anyone who needs to mulch.

It's time to give up the search for the invisible.
On the best of days there's little more
than the faintest intimations. The millennium,
my dear, is sure to disappoint us.
I think I'll keep on describing things
to ensure that they really happened.

EVANESCENCE

The silhouette of a mountain. Above it
a dark halo of rain. Dusk's light
fading, holding on. He thinks he's seen
some visible trace of some absent thing.
Knows he won't talk about it, can't.
He arrives home to the small winter pleasures
of a clothes tree, a hatrack,
his heroine in a housedress saying hello.
He could be anyone aware of an almost,
not necessarily sad. He could be a brute
suddenly chastened by the physical world.
They talk about the storm in the mountains
destined for the lowlands, the béarnaise sauce
and the fine cut of beef it improves.
The commonplace and its contingincies,
his half-filled cup, the monstrous
domesticated by the six o'clock news—
these are his endurances,
in fact his privileges, if he has any sense.
Later while they make love, he thinks of
Mantle's long home run in the '57 Series.
He falls to sleep searching for a word.

AT THE RESTAURANT

Life would be unbearable

if we made ourselves conscious of it.

—Fernando Pessoa

Six people are too many people
and a public place the wrong place
for what you're thinking—

stop this now.

Who do you think you are?
The duck à l'orange is spectacular,
the flan the best in town.

But there among your friends
is the unspoken, as ever,
chatter and gaiety its familiar song.

And there's your chronic emptiness
spiraling upward in search of words
you'll dare not say

without irony.
You should have stayed at home.
It's part of the social contract

to seem to be where your body is,
and you've been elsewhere like this,
for Christ's sake, countless times;

behave, feign.

Certainly you believe a part of decency
is to overlook, to let pass?
Praise the Caesar salad. Praise Susan's

black dress, Paul's promotion and raise.
Inexcusable, the slaughter in this world.
Insufficient, the merely decent man.

The Death of God

When the news filtered to the angels
they were overwhelmed by their sudden aloneness.
Long into the night they waited for instructions;
the night was quieter than any night they'd known.
I don't have a thought in my head, one angel lamented.
Others worried, Is there such a thing as an angel now?
New to questioning, dashed by the dry light
of reason, some fell into despair. Many disappeared.
A few wandered naturally toward power, were hired
by dictators who needed something like an angel
to represent them to the world.
These angels spoke the pure secular word.
They murdered sweetly and extolled the greater good.
The Dark Angel himself was simply amused.

The void grew, and was fabulously filled.
Vast stadiums and elaborate malls—
the new cathedrals—were built
where people cheered and consumed.
At the nostalgia shops angel trinkets
and plastic crucifixes lined the shelves.
The old churches were homes for the poor.

And yet before meals and at bedtime
and in the iconographies of dreams,
God took his invisible place in the kingdom of need.
Disaffected minstrels made and sang His songs.
The angels were given breath and brain.
This all went on while He was dead to the world.

The Dark Angel observed it, waiting as ever.
On these things his entire existence depended.

POINTS UNKNOWN
A Century of Great Exploration

---

Edited by David Roberts

W. W. Norton & Company

Copyright © 2000 David Roberts. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgements	13
I
	Before the Sky Darkens	19
	Sixty	21
	Evanescence	23
	At the Restaurant	24
	The Death of God	26
	Capriccio Italien	28
	Old Dogs	30
	Odysseu's Secret	32
	What Goes On	34
	Their Divorce	36
	Dog Weather	38
	Optimism	40
	Androgyne	41
	Zero Hour	43
	The Hours	44
II
	The Party	47
	Simpler Times	49
	Our Parents	51
	Empathy	52
	The Last Hours	55
	Luck	57
	The Sexual Revolution	59
	The Same Cold	61
	Losing Steps	63
	After	66
	So Far	67
	Different Hours	69
III
	The Reverse Side	73
	The Overt	74
	John & Mary	77
	Art	79
	Rubbing	81
	A Spiritual Woman	83
	Irresistible	85
	Returning from an Artist's Studio	87
	Story	89
	Visiting the Master	91
IV
	The Metaphysicians of South Jersey	95
	His Town	97
	Another Man	99
	Men in the Sky	101
	Emperors	102
	One Moment and the Next in the Pine Barrens	104
	Afterlife	106
	Chokecherry	108
	Nature	109
	Burying the Cat	111
	Oklahoma City	113
	Backwaters	115
	Phantom	117
	A Postmortem Guide	119

Editorial Reviews

The poems in Stephen Dunn's 11th collection, Different Hours -- winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry -- find their inspiration in the details of everyday life. As one poems puts it: "Use what's lying around the house./ Make it simple and sad." Dunn's work here is, as always, phenomenally accessible, using common language and conversational verse to address issues associated with love, age, and death. But what truly makes these poems stand apart is the giant leap the poet takes from the personal, "the commonplace and its contingencies," to the historical, the philosophical, and the universal.

bn.com

[L]eads us down a trail of wisdom, teaching us to live like the poet.

Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Wisdom might be something we could only learn through a language like Stephen Dunn's, unbearably fearless and beautiful.

Gerald Stern

This sensitive 11th book from Dunn (Loosestrife) largely sticks to familiar territory: in one central poem, a "master" advises the speaker to "Use what's lying around the house./ Make it simple and sad." Dunn follows that advice unwaveringly: his short lyrics in conversational language address the difficulties and small victories of everyday life--fears on turning 60, marital quarrels, suburban weather, "the commonplace and its contingencies." Like Gerald Stern and Philip Booth, Dunn strives to describe the travails of ordinary people in language not only simplified but generalized: a friend's divorce leads the speaker to say "no one can know what goes on/ in the pale trappings of bedrooms," while scary headlines and advancing age prompt the remark that "it's tempting to believe/ we lived in simpler times." Poems about places offer few surprises: Italy yields "the chosen gloomy beauty of a tourist town," and a series of poems about Dunn's native South Jersey produce phrases almost as stale. Many poems try so hard for their transparency that they become predictable, so hard to be representative that their speakers seem too normal to be true, even the usually multi-valent Odysseus, who here "sailed through storm and wild sea/ as if his beloved were all that ever mattered." Such mythical alter egos, when they appear, disappear into the dominant mode here, that of a quiet family man who wants to be kind and to marvel at the ordinary, "amazed/ that the paper has been delivered." Fans will pick up this book to get news of his latest doings, but despite its accessibility, it will draw few new subscribers. (Nov.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

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