Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry

Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry collects the work of the American poet Alan Dugan across a career of some forty years, together with about three dozen new poems written when he was nearly eighty. Dugan served in the Army Air Corps during the Second World War, and several of his early poems take a dry, unsentimental look at the grim business of modern war. Others face loneliness, emptiness and the daily struggles of ordinary life with sharp, dark humor. Throughout, Dugan insists that poetry should stay grounded in real experience, and he takes frequent aim at pretension, academic stuffiness and pious solemnity. Read together, the poems show a consistent voice: blunt, witty, skeptical and deeply attentive to the textures of working life. The collection is a natural introduction to a distinctive voice in postwar American poetry and a complete record for longtime readers. It won the 2001 National Book Award for Poetry.