The Not Yet Fallen World: New and Selected Poems - Paperback

by Stephen Dunn (Author)

Hailed as "indispensable" (David Wojahn), Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn masterfully shifts between the metaphysical and the ironic, never wavering in his essential honesty. His graceful poems confront our contradictions with tenderness and wit, enliven the ordinary with penetrating observation, and alert us to the haunting wonders and relationships that surround us.

The Not Yet Fallen World draws from all nineteen of Stephen Dunn's crystalline volumes, including his most recent, Pagan Virtues (2019); the National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Loosestrife (1996); and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Different Hours (2000). By turns sardonic and profound, Dunn examines the disguises we don to hide from ourselves and reveals sublime beauty hidden within seemingly mundane interactions. Nine new poems extend the poet's inquiry into the paradoxes of contemporary life; as he writes in "Love Poem Near the End of the World," "Something keeps me holding on / to a future I didn't think possible."

Arranged to further Dunn's signature themes--mortality, morality, and the roles we play in the essential human comedy of getting through each day--this final collection captures the breadth of an acclaimed poet's achievement. His legacy is a poetic expanse suffused with fearless generosity and perceptive wisdom.

Back Jacket

Praise for Stephen Dunn

"A poet who time and again achieves that most difficult magic of the ordinary. [Stephen Dunn] can take you by the hand and lead you along a street you may have passed through every day without much notice, and suddenly, at this new angle, the ordinary reveals in itself all the splendor and terror of existence."
--Rita Dove, Washington Post

"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

"Stephen Dunn has a gift for aphorism, but his most startling ability is the way he maps out the subtle, mordant shifts of adult morality."
--New York Times Book Review

"Dunn's poetry is the poetry of experience, of humor, of irony, of daily life, of love--and of the most elegant verbal sparring with the self."
--Alicia Ostriker

"There's a deep and reliable honesty that drives [Dunn's] poems.... That the poems manage this kind of transmission of (no other word for it) truth, and make that truth so much a delight to hear--well, that's what Stephen Dunn has been doing all his writing life. That's why his poems have been, and remain, indispensable."
--Robert Wrigley