Reviewed by Joanna Pearson

If I were forced to spend all day in some bleak, beige midatlantic shopping center a beltway’s drive away from I-95 but allowed to pick one living poet to accompany me and make my hours worthwhile, I’d probably pick Stephen Dunn. Why? I’m guessing only Dunn could express something plaintive and beautiful while passing the boysenberry syrup in the IHOP. He’d make a trenchant observation while inspecting the nail clippers at Sally Beauty Supply. We’d walk by Fashion Bug or Dollar Tree, and Dunn would find something lovely in a pair of panty hose or a purple comb set. He’d prove to me that there is beauty in restraint; that you need no Greek columns or stage sets if you know what you’re doing. And Dunn knows what he’s doing, as he’s proven yet again in his newest collection of poetry Everything Else in the World.

Lest anyone be misled, this collection is neither set in nor refers to in any way to suburban shopping center. It’s just that Dunn would be perfectly comfortable there—he’d be perfectly comfortable anywhere: your backyard, a bus station, a cramped library carrel. With none of the trappings of the artiste, he’d settle down to the business of writing, never saying too much, but always saying it just right. He is straightforward, speaks plainly, without pretense—a kind of confidence that tends to earn a writer the label “accessible,” a tag that BJ Ward once discussed far more eloquently than I can in his introduction to Dunn:

I bring up the distinction between artist and entertainer because I once read a review of Stephen's work in which the reviewer called his poetry "accessible." In truth, I agree. His work is accessible. For the willing and intelligent audience, great art always is. However, I am aware that, for some, the word carries baggage--an implication that the work is simple. For some, to classify a work as accessible is to diminish its importance. In fact, Stephen Dunn writes of some of the most complicated issues I've seen a poet tackle, be it a sympathetic, uncompromised, and knowingly-ineffective offering to a terrorist, the arrival at a recognition that need surpasses obligations--even those associated with family--or an accounting of "the places we can't bear to be found." He handles these subjects without diminishing them or easing into any pedantic offerings. He takes a hard road to the small truths we build our lives on.
–BJ Ward

Introduction to Stephen Dunn for the Skylands Writers & Artists Association, Nov. 9, 1997

And it is these small truths that Dunn tackles in Everything Else in the World. Throughout the collections three sections, Dunn considers dream life, the poetic process, and longing. Never unaware of practicalities, these topics are always juxtaposed to the dailiness of living—an effect that is often surprisingly erotic, particularly in the third section. Take for example the poem “The Slow Surge”:

How sweetly disappeared the silky distraction
of her clothes, and before that the delicacy
with which she stepped out of her shoes.

Can one ever unlearn what one knows?
In postcoital calm I was at home
in the great, minor world

of flesh, languor, and whispery talk.
Sure, I knew, the slow surge of dawn
would give way to rush hour and chores.

It would be hard to ignore the ugliness—
the already brutal century,
the cold, spireless malls—everything the mind

lets in after lovemaking has run its course,
when even a breast that excited you so
is merely companionable, a place to rest your hand.

It is this awareness of the “cold, spireless malls” and the “already brutal century” that give Dunn’s musings an urgency, a weight they would not otherwise have. He holds the quotidian and the transcendent simultaneously in view, proving they are different sides of the same coin, or as the case may be, breast.

His poem, “Summer Nocturne,” is a somewhat similar lesson in opposites. The speaker is alone at night while his lover is away listening to the garbage can being rattled by raccoon hands, drinking Johnnie Walker, reading. The poem’s final stanza is “Night of small revelations, night of odd comfort./ Starting to love this distance./ Starting to feel how present you are in it.” Dunn again asserts that it is the reality of everyday circumstance that proves most fertile for the imagination. The lover’s very distance gives her presence.

Overall, it’d be hard to say that this collection exceeds Dunn’s wonderful Different Hours, but Everything Else in the World is quiet, thoughtful, and good. He still plays with dreams and circumstance, still has the small sparkling moments: “We rippled the moon for them,/ the government men. We pretended to be sad/when it slid through our fingers…” “Moonrakers” l. 1-3. I might call this collection Dunn’s B-sides—and actually mean it as no real slight. Few of the poems could stand out as chart-topping singles like those in Different Hours could, but these poems certainly coalesce into a lovely, atmospheric follow-up.

Read it and see. Dunn is the writer’s MacGyver, succeeding with few props where others fail. With the literary equivalent of a bit of floss, a soda can, and some broken battery, he’ll rig together poetry. And set against those cold, spireless malls, the small flame of his talent in Everything Else in the World only burns more steadily.