Celebration and elegy coexist in Robert Dunn’s carefully wrought poems, some no longer than a single, unadorned sentence. They are marvels of wit and heart and should be committed to memory and then bruited about—as news or shared gossip—as Robert himself would have had it. —Marie Harris
Like his fellow New England traveler Emily Dickinson, Robert Dunn appears to have lived a circumscribed life, but these multi-faceted, whimsical, and deadly serious poems will dispel that myth. From oil spills to infinity, from war protest to hope, Dunn’s poems are a metaphysical distillation of the tunes Robert Dunn spun as he walked the old seacoast town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. These lines from Five Songs About Rain reveal Dunn’s kinship with Dickinson, that heady mix of humor and philosophy,
“…each drop a narrow world/Including seven worlds/(And me) eight times infinity.” Pithy, enigmatic machines made of words, Dunn’s lines invite us. Go inside these prismatic, necessary workings where both we and our worlds are made new. —Mimi White
