What Goes On

"Good poems are triumphs over the unlikely," Stephen Dunn says. "They make us pay attention in new ways." In his second new and selected collection, Dunn subtly enlarges our sense of possibility. His new poems, suffused with affection and rue for our world, occasionally address the metaphysical, as in these lines --

from "Talk to God"

Ease into your misgivings
Ask him if in his weakness
he was ever responsible
for a pettiness -- some weather, say,
brought in to show who's boss
when no one seemed sufficiently moved
by a sunset or the shape of an egg.
Ask him if when he gave us desire
he had underestimated its power.