Local Time

This collection of 41 poems is the sixth volume of poetry from Dunn, who teaches at a state college in New Jersey and in a graduate writing program at Columbia. Dunn uses a simple vocabulary and a direct, accessible voice to evoke the passions and ruptures of lovers, and to narrate events in his own and his family's lives. He writes about a couple after an argument, when each is drawn to the other yet is unwilling to compromise; he describes what happens to love over time, and what men talk about among themselves. In ""The Gulf'' a man bemoans his lack of understanding of what a woman endures, physically and emotionally, each menstruating month. Elsewhere, Dunn writes in verse that verges on prose about the year his father was unemployed and made friends over the phone with an obscene caller. In a steady, unpretentious voice, Dunn reexamines occurrences of everyday life. (March 31)