1. THE BOOK At the core of Robert Duncan’s poetry is myth. He likely had a more complex and nuanced understanding of myth than any other American poet of the twentieth century. For Duncan, myth and poetry are the snakes entwined around Hermes’ caduceus, whose flowering rod bursting forth into wings H.D. waved like a […]

This essay originally appeared inWild Orchids #3: William Blake The cycle of creation, redemption, and apocalypse wheels like a great zodiac in the creative heavens of Blake’s prophetic works. Creation was Blake’s mastery; as Los, he toiled at the furnaces of Ulro, contemplating Enormous Works, battling the world to forge his poetry. Redemption was the […]

Miracle of the Wolves      “All the roads to Angoulême are closed!” shouted Bolar, crouching at the edge of the ditch, a black shawl twisted over his thick hair.      Immense clouds soared across the sky. As the wind’s roar grew and grew, the clouds roiled ferociously. Erect and noble, the trees pushed high into the sky, […]

Gustaf Sobin. Collected Poems, edited by Esther Sobin, Andrew Joron, Andrew Zawacki, and Edward Foster. Talisman House, 2010. A poet of spectacular deliberateness, Gustaf Sobin transformed the ode into language captured in time-lapse. Reading this carefully assembled Collected Poems, published in 2010 by Talisman House, we come into contact with a mind capable of totally […]

Canti, Giacomo Leopardi | Translated by Jonathan Galassi | Farrar Straus Giroux, 2010 Whether one prefers Longfellow’s version of the Inferno, or Ciaran Carson’s, one knows Dante’s name, as one knows the names Baudelaire and Goethe. Introducing his Leopardi: Selected Poems, Eamon Grennan is blunt: “mention the name Leopardi to ten educated people (poets included) […]

In a 1962 letter to his half-sister June Degnan, poet George Oppen laments that now that he is fifty-three years old; he has at most another twenty years of active writing ahead of him. As far as he is concerned, he tells Degnan, it is sufficient time in which to achieve what he set out […]

Angina Days | Selected Poems by Günter Eich Princeton University Press, 2010, Cloth, $24.95      The narrative of discovery and recovery of a writer we can describe quite reasonably as essential is compelling.[1. 1. Two earlier collections exist. Pigeons and Moles: Selected Writings of Günter Eich, translated with an Introduction by Michael Hamburger, Camden House, 1990. […]

[ click here to order ] Foreign poets who receive the “FSG treatment” are guaranteed attention. When I learned that Michael Hofmann, the German-born English poet was to receive it this spring, I expected more. Hofmann is a prolific and often trenchant critic. He is a respected and amazingly prolific translator who has Englished, among […]