The first of seven books of poetry published during Dugan's lifetime, "Poems" examines the unusual details of everyday subjects, including waterfalls, house plants, love, war, religion, and the Irish. Explorations inevitably arouse feelings of aliena...

In an essay on his own work in "19 New American Poets of the Golden Gate", Jack Gilbert writes that "I am by nature drawn to exigence, compression, selection... One of the special pleasures in poetry for me is accomplishing a lot with the least means...