Collected Earlier Poems
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Price: $13.44
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List Price:
Price: $13.44
You Save: $8.56 (39%)
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Hecht Anthony
Selected Poems
 List Price: Price: $10.99 You Save: $6.96 (39%) DescriptionAlongside Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, and other pillars of twentieth-century poetry, Anthony Hecht joins the Borzoi Poetry series.Hecht, whose writing rings with the cadences of the King James Bible, and who, as an infantryman at the end of World War II, participated in the liberation of the concentration camps, lived and experienced the best and worst of the twentieth century. Readers of this volume—the first selected poems to be made from Hecht’s seven individual volumes—will be captivated by Hecht’s dark music and allusions to the literature of the past. As J. D. McClatchy explains in his introduction, Hecht was a poet for whom formal elegance was inextricably bound up with the dramatic force, thematic ambition, and powerful emotions in each poem. The rules of his art, which he both honored and transformed, are “moral principles meant finally to reveal the structure of human dilemmas and sympathies.” This elevated sense of what poetry can accomplish defines our experience of reading Hecht, and will ensure his place in the canon for years to come. Adam and Eve knew such perfection once, God’s finger in the cloud, and on the ground Nothing but springtime, nothing else at all. But in our fallen state where the blood hunts For blood, and rises at the hunting sound, What do we know of lasting since the fall? Who has not, in the oil and heat of youth, Thought of the flourishing of the almond tree, The grasshopper, and the failing of desire, And thought his tongue might pierce the secrecy Of the six-pointed starlight, and might choir A secret-voweled, unutterable truth? —from “A Poem for Julia”
Collected Later Poems
 List Price: Price: $11.20 You Save: $5.75 (34%) DescriptionAnthony Hecht, now in his eightieth year, has earned a place alongside such poets as W. H. Auden, Robert Frost, and Elizabeth Bishop. Here under one cover are his three most recent collections–The Transparent Man, Flight Among the Tombs, and The Darkness and the Light. The perfect companion to his Collected Earlier Poems (continuously in print since 1990), this book brings the eloquent sound of Hecht’s music to bear on a wide variety of human dramas: from a young woman dying of leukemia to the tangled love affairs of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; from Death as the director of Hollywood films to the unexpected image of Marcel Proust as a figure skater.He glides with a gaining confidence, inscribes Tentative passages, thinks again, backtracks, Comes to a minute point, Then wheels about in widening sweeps and lobes, Large Palmer cursives and smooth entrelacs, Preoccupied, intent On a subtle, long-drawn style and pliant script Incised with twin steel blades and qualified Perfectly to express, With arms flung wide or gloved hands firmly gripped Behind his back, attentively, clear-eyed, A glancing happiness. From the Hardcover edition.
Flight Among the Tombs: Poems
 List Price: Price: $11.61 You Save: $4.39 (27%) DescriptionDivided into two parts, this new book contains a collaboration with the artist Leonard Baskin called "Presumptions of Death, " reproducing 22 masterly wood engravings and all of Hecht's other poems written since his last book, The Transparent Man.Flight Among the Tombs, Anthony Hecht's sixth book of poems published since 1954, shows one of America's foremost poets working at the top of his form. Part scholar, part circus ringmaster, Hecht calls our attention to three rings of his erudition: classical wit, Renaissance energy, and contemporary doubt. A fragment of Christopher Smart provides the book's title, but George Herbert, in whose clever prosodic vineyards Hecht has long labored, casts the book's longest shadow. The first half contains lyrical poems in which Death--both scythe-hauling figure and physical phenomenon--speaks as the central character inside a collage of masks: carnival barker, film director, society lady, member of the Harlem Guild of St. Luke, and, of course, poet. Hilarious and creepy, the poems combine Hecht's late-modernist sense of ironic humor with an orchestra of Latin and Renaissance conceits, stripping away the latter's theology to express a very inclusive mortality. Yet Hecht, whose deep humanity prevents these poems from becoming mere set pieces of the macabre, turns this message of doom into a call to enjoy the unpredictable in life, as the speaker watching aristocrats dine says in "Death the Mexican Revolutionary," We recommend the quail,Several occasional poems in the book's second half mark the passing of Hecht's generation, including "For James Merrill: An Adieu" and "A Death in Winter," honoring the memory of Joseph Brodsky. These poems are particularly moving in light of the rambunctious sensibility of the volume's first half. At turns outrageous and somber, Flight Among the Tombs is a surprising addition to Hecht's oeuvre. --Edward Skoog
The Darkness and the Light: Poems
 List Price: Price: $8.50 You Save: $14.50 (63%) DescriptionThe poetry of Anthony Hecht has been praised by Harold Bloom and Ted Hughes, among others, for its sure control of difficult material and its unique music and visual precision. This new volume is the fruit of a mellowing maturity that carries with it a smoky bitterness, a flavor of ancient and experienced wisdom, as in this stanza from “Sarabande on Attaining the Age of Seventy-seven”:A turn, a glide, a quarter-turn and bow, The stately dance advances; these are airs Bone-deep and numbing as I should know by now, Diminishing the cast, like musical chairs. Hecht’s verse—by turns lyric and narrative, formal and free—is grounded in the compassion that comes from a deep understanding of every kind of human depredation, yet is tempered by flashes of wry comedy, and still more by innocent pleasure in the gifts of the natural world. Followers of his poetry will recognize an evolution of style in many of these poems—a quiet and understated voice, passing through darkness toward realms of delight.
Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)
 List Price: Price: $16.00 You Save: $24.00 (60%) DescriptionHecht Anthony News
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Book Review: A book of conceits and confessions, most interestingAbout McClatchy's work, the poet Anthony Hecht said, "There are very few poets writing today who, poem by poem, move me from admiration to admiration,