“The reverse side also has a reversed side” -A JAPANESE PROVERB
Stephen Dunn won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for this 2001 collection, Different Hours.
And this different hour, fell into my lap in a diverging hour, last year, when Sun rays were diverging from the horizon, near the sunset time, after a black patch of gloomy cloud just passed through it. With my commitment to myself that I will consume ‘an enormous amount’ of English poetry this year, which I completely failed to achieve last year, I will begin with this. Last year I had decided that I will read at least a good number of major contemporary poets in English, but I ended up with only two. Mary Oliver and Louise Gluck!
And the interesting thing is that the first poem of this collection is “before the sky darkens” and this auspice, converted my sudden selection of this book to a purposeful hand-pick when sun rays kept diverging outside my window.
“Sunsets, incipient storms, the tableau
of melancholy- maybe these are the
Saturdays- night events
To take your best girl to.”
STEPHEN DUNN
You need a certain temperament to read poetry. Because it’s succinct in structure yet the range is vast. So if you miss a critical line, the entire essence of a poem written in one page may slip out of hand. And the person, like me who is badly off with regard to contemporary English poetry, extra effort was required. I think I know sweet Fanny Adams about contemporary English poems!
When I have started reading them, I was wondering, does not anyone write in rhymes these days? I had no answer. A poem like “Androgyne” sailed me through. He talked about his lost love in that poem. There is an emotional poem on parents also.
“Our parents died at least twice,
The second time when we forgot their stories,
Or could not imagine how often they craved love,
Or felt useless or yearned some justice
in this world.”
DIFFERENT HOURS
In the poem Different hours, he writes so beautifully the normal things around him,
“A dazed rabbit sits on a dewy grass
The clamatis has no aspirations
As it climbs its trestles.
I pour myself an orange juice, Homestyle.
I say the hell with low fat cream cheese
And slather the good stuff on my bagel.”
STEPHEN DUNN
John and Mary is another poem, I liked, it’s a story about two people who never met,
“They were like gazelles who occupied different
grassy plains, running in opposite directions
from different lions. They were like postal clerks
in different zip codes, with different vacation time,
their bosses adamant and clock-driven.
How could they get together?”
DIFFERENT HOURS
Among some other poems, Chokecherry, the death of the God, Oklahoma City are also good. His poetry in this book is filled with wisdom, the routine things are sketched in flowery language, and his aesthetics are graceful and elegant. Human relations, nature, and philosophy, everything you will find in this collection. Lots of cats, and dogs too! And small stories have been written in beautiful poems. Art, spiritual woman, the sexual revolution, are some other themes through poems, he has beautifully explored. I have liked this book of poems and, slowly – slowly, I am trying to manage the contemporary stuff.
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