Product Description
Anthony 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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

late James of poetry
I'll say this up front that I know of no English speaking poet in the second half of the twentieth century who, for the mastery of his craft, the depth of his psychological insight, and the gravity of view of the world, who even comes close to Anthony Hecht. As I say in the subject line, he is poetry's version of late Henry James, and one in possession of the wisdom of Sophocles. Perhaps it will take time to recognize the magnitude of his achievement, but it is surely written in the literary history to come.

A pained elegance Hecht is a poet of elegance and clarity, of classical learned lines reflecting a rich personal experience. He
Hecht is a poet of elegance and clarity, of classical learned lines reflecting a rich personal experience. He is too someone who looks at life with a hard realism which comes from his not easy - life including second world- war combat and being one of the American soldiers who liberated the concentration camp Flossenburg.
He confronts the bitterness of desolate landscapes and makes of these meetings a music of deep poetic beauty.
"

... Read more

Product Description
Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Hecht has long been regarded as one of the great modern American poets, and is hailed by many as the unofficial `Poet Laureate' of the USA. This volume brings together all the poems contained in The Hard Hours (1967), Millions of Strange Shadows (1977), and The Venetian Vespers (1980), and versions of Joseph Brodsky's early poems, which Hecht was the first to translate. These three distinguished books affirm Hecht's reputation as a technically accomplished poet capable of powerfully expressing deep sentiment and original thought. This book is intended for poetry lovers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Formal and Savage
Contains the complete texts of Millions of Strange Shadows, The Venetian Vespers, and The Hard Hours (for which he won the Pulitzer prize). Hechts poems are formal and savage. You'd be hard pressed to find another poet who can write with such grace and ferocity. From jealous love to the holocaust, Hecht approaches every topic. One of America's greatest, and, unfortunately, lesser known poets.

To read more reviews check out Void Magazine's website.

a truly wonderful collection
if i had to describe Anthony Hecht in one word, it would be regal. there is no poet who looks more dignified or acts with more dignity. and his poetry is full of grace, dignity, and a quiet power. it is no wonder that hecht is as respected as he is. the poems in this collection are ones to be read slowly, over time, in order to fully digest what makes hecht such a magnificant poet.

Meticulous, inspiring work
Anthony Hecht's poems are such carefully crafted masterpieces, unfolding beautifully, quietly creeping into the heart.For those who recognize and appreciate the flow of language, the meter of words and syllables.Read "A Letter" and "Sestina d'Inverno."True works of art.

Moses coming down from Mount Parnassus
Anthony Hecht is Moses coming down from Mount Parnassus with these Collected Earlier Poems as his Ten Commandments on the craft of ARS POETICA. He is perfectly at ease with all the elements of style and leadsthe reader easily into his world of observed treasures- Venetian Vespers -Cape Cod Lullaby - and for a change of pace, Third Avenue in Sunlight. Anabsolute master of his craft. ... Read more

Product Description
Alongside 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” ... Read more

Product Description

The fruit of a lifetime's reading and thinking about literature, its delights and its responsibilities, this book by acclaimed poet and critic Anthony Hecht explores the mysteries of poetry, offering profound insight into poetic form, meter, rhyme, and meaning. Ranging from Renaissance to contemporary poets, Hecht considers the work of Shakespeare, Sidney, and Noel; Housman, Hopkins, Eliot, and Auden; Frost, Bishop, and Wilbur; Amichai, Simic, and Heaney. Stepping back from individual poets, Hecht muses on rhyme and on meter, and also discusses St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians and Melville's Moby-Dick. Uniting these diverse subjects is Hecht's preoccupation with the careful deployment of words, the richness and versatility of language and of those who use it well.

Elegantly written, deeply informed, and intellectually playful, Melodies Unheard confirms Anthony Hecht's reputation as one of our most original and imaginative thinkers on the literary arts.

Customer Reviews (3)

Poet writes about poetry
A mix of essays by one of America's great contemporary poets (though now deceased).Some of the essays are short reviews or treatments of one or two poems; others, more developed, comprehensive discussions (e.g., Shakespeare's sonnets, the sestina as a form).Always readable, often illuminating.

Essays Unsurpassed
This compilation of essays by perhaps the finest, most elegant poet writing on either side of the Atlantic has its faults.The first one to catch the eye is that the first two essays on the Sonnet repeat each other, word for word, in several places.But taking the work, which covers many subjects in addition to the "Melodies Unheard," which is saved for the last, as a whole, one can not help be struck by Hecht's depth of insight and urbanity of expression on each subject: from Sidney, to Elizabeth Bishop, to Moby Dick.It is simply impossible for a poetic mind to come away unmoved or without perspective shifted from the depths so adroitly explored here. My favourite example (And I suspect Hecht's as well, since it's the only chapter in the book on which he lavishes a full page reproduction of a Bosch painting in illustration of a part of a poem.Indeed, there are no other props of this sort in the entire collection.) is his explication of Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Man-Moth."I never thought very much of Ms. Bishop's poetry before reading this explication, so deep and fecund of insight.- But herein lies a sort of paradox inherent to most all these essays-I now appreciate "The Man-Moth" exceedingly but am even more overwhelmed by rereading Hecht's poetic explication of the poem.The same is true of Hecht on Moby Dick.I suppose this is a great compliment.But one wonders whether Ms. Bishop would have thought so.In any event, though disagreeing with Hecht in regard to a couple of minor nuances here and there, I would say to the already very select group considering the purchase of this book that it's well worth it.Maybe, if Bishop is a favourite poet of yours or Melville a favourite author, too well worth it.As Hecht avers in the last essay, "...our experience of poetry is no simple business." - Nor is our experience of Hecht.

Solving poetry's mystery by exploring others' craft
REVIEWED BY HENRY TAYLOR ...

Anthony Hecht, one of the very few finest poets of the past 50 years, is also one of the most learned, wide-ranging, perceptive, and engaging critics. Now 80, he has gathered in this new collection, "Melodies Unheard," 18 essays, most of them done in the past five years in response to invitations and assignments of various kinds, from centenary observances to pieces for The New York Review of Books.
As to his subtitle, he remarks in his Introduction, "What, I have asked myself, is the critic trying to do? And there are plenty of answers. But perhaps we might begin with the urge governing Poe's Auguste Dupin: to solve a mystery. Not infrequently this means discovering that there was a mystery to be solved in the first place, because no one had noticed any need for scrutiny."
Though he does not say so explicitly, Mr. Hecht appears also to be concerned with "mystery" in the sense of skill, craft, or art; this older usage appeared often in the indentures of apprentices, bound for a period to learn the mysteries of , say, tailoring. Near the end of his Introduction, he says, "No poet examines someone else's poem, especially a major poem or a large body of poetry, without hoping to learn something from such scrutiny; and, moreover, to learn something he can put to his own personal use."
It is an inspiring and humbling object lesson for any serious reader to behold the thoroughness with which Mr. Hecht opens his powers of perception to the variety of texts he encountered in the course of writing these pieces. He has his preferences, to be sure; he understands that meter and rhyme have been integral to poetry for centuries, and that to dispense with them is to incur serious risks. It must be noted, however, that he is no knee-jerk enemy of free verse; one of the best pieces here is a penetrating and highly favorable consideration of Charles Simic, whose unmetrical surrealism Mr. Hecht praises for its resonance and responsibility.
Collections of separate critical pieces can sometimes seem too miscellaneous, whatever the brilliance or persuasiveness on display in the individual essays. Mr. Hecht has addressed this matter with unusual thoughtfulness and diligence, and the result is a solid book rather than an assemblage of book parts.
First, his Introduction takes up some points not dealt with to his satisfaction in the essays. For example, early in an essay chiefly concerned with the opening of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," Mr. Hecht mentions "the bedeviling topic of Eliot's anti-Semitism, which I must leave for another time." He makes short work of William Empson's attempt to make Eliot out as a decent fellow of his time who had no problem with some of his time's notions, and just slightly longer work of Eliot's own claim that he was not an anti-Semite and never had been.
Anti-Semitism arises again in a discussion of St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians; Mr. Hecht's treatment of it is notable for its patient use of a remarkable amount of Biblical knowledge, and for its tact with personal reminiscences of direct encounters with wounding prejudice.
Second, the book concludes with an essay called "The Music of Formsþ" which appears to have been written for the collection; it is not mentioned in the acknowledgments of editors and lecture venues. It is here that Mr. Hecht is most clearly distressed at what seems to him the shrinking audience for such delicacies of technique as he explores in the rest of the book. For years, he tells us, it was his habit, following some exposition of metrical terminology and example, to ask his undergraduate students to locate for him the place where the dialogue of Romeo and Juliet shifts from prose into verse. It didn't last:
"After a certain number of years I gave up asking my classes this question, which obviously embarrassed them and discouraged me, for it became transparently clear that the overwhelming majority of my students were quite simply deaf to almost all metrical considerations and that my introductory lecture on the topic was purposeless and wasteful. And I reluctantly concluded that there are many who are not so much mystified by meter as completely oblivious to it."
One who has repeatedly urged students to observe line-ends when quoting poetry in critical papers can but agree with this assessment. However, it seems always to have been the case that those to whom matters of precision and beauty of language are matters of great importance - of life and death, as we sayþ - are greatly outnumbered by those to whom such matters are of no importance. Mr. Hecht strikes a firm balance between taking pessimistic notice of this situation, and considering that Milton's "fit audience though few" is entirely deserving of the best effort he can muster.
Thus Mr. Hecht proceeds, with grace, urbanity, good humor, and vast erudition, to consider certain literary works from the past eight centuries, and to shed light on their techniques and on a few instances of obscurity.
Among the poets treated are Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, A.E. Housman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, and Yehuda Amichai. There are also essays on aspects of "Moby-Dick," and on the prose of Seamus Heaney. The approaches range from close explication of text to sweeping historical surveys. Throughout, the style and manner are those of a deeply knowledgeable and polished conversationalist, grateful to be in the presence of the works he understands so well. Care for poetry and its traditions has seldom been so memorably exemplified. ... Read more

Product Description
It took Waywiser Press' screening panel two months of careful reading, deliberation and discussion to narrow the field, first to twenty semi-finalists, and then to ten finalists. The latter (stripped of all identifying references) were then sent to the 2007 judge, Richard Wilbur. Joe Harrison rang Ms Kelleher with Mr Wilbur's decision in March.Rose Kelleher (b. 1964) grew up in Massachusetts and earned her B.A. in English at UMass Boston. She has worked as a technical writer and programmer, and authored four computer books and numerous technical articles. Since rediscovering poetry in recent years, Rose has published poems and essays in a variety of magazines, including Anon, Atlanta Review, The Dark Horse, First Things, iota, Measure, The Shit Creek Review, Snakeskin and Verse Daily, and been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

audacious debut
It's a terrific book. On reflection, I'm amazed at the variety of subject and mood that Kelleher has achieved in a book filled with brief, almost exclusively metrical lyrics.Very few of the poems go longer than twenty lines, and only a handful stretch onto a second page, yet Kelleher's formal ingenuity is such that the reader keeps encountering the unexpected. Even her sonnets, despite being somewhat overrepresented here as in formal poetry generally, consistently startle and delight.

In fact, from the evidence of the poems, it would seem that startling and delighting are something like goals for this writer. Most poems take off from, or dwell on, some kind of paradox. In this book, piety underlies perversity, and an acknowledged illusion can yield bedrock truth - or vice-versa. Like a skilled magician, Kelleher again and again sets up an expectation, only to confound it by delivering something unexpected and marvelous. And through it all, she writes with an engineer's precision and a musician's pitch and rhythm. The results are always clever, frequently illuminating, and, at their best, as in the religious poems which open the book, can achieve profundity.

Visceral and thoughtful poems


It is fitting that Rose Kelleher is the 2007 winner of the poetry prize dedicated to the name of Anthony Hecht.No poet of the twentieth century is more thoughtful or more emotionally honest than Hecht. Rose Kelleher displays the same visceral honesty.Her world, like Hecht's, is painful and would be disappointed but for the sense of worth which encompasses all living and inanimate things in her poems.

The book is divided under headings: God; Science; People; Perversity; Love.

The first poem in the "God" section, "Asperger's Muse", is a rhythmical, blank verseevocation of the hermetic, mathematical rapture of one Asperger subject.

I have read many poems inspired by 9/11 but few equal to her "War of the Worlds".Its understated simplicity is stunning.

She handles sonnet form and free verse with ease.
She has even written an impertinent sestina, "Random Sextet", which plays happily with this usually intractable form.Another poem, "An Old Song", timelessly, with lilting meter gives voice to a grieving woman who longs for the return of her dead soldier-love.

"Noted Sadomasochists" is coincidentally very "Hechtian";a suite of poems dedicated to gifted historical figures who had unusual habits.

"Rays at CapeHatteras", in the "Science" section, explodes with natural energy and beauty. Science is about life.

"Mortimer", in the "Love" section, while ostensibly about a puppet is about free will, dependency and addiction.An astonishing poem.

Anyone who values unorthodox beauty and originality and who loves to see old forms made modern, must read and reread this book. Everything surprises and nothing is accepted.This is a very tough, modern poet who knows how to play on our doubts and uncertainties. Rose Kelleher is never boring.

The great poet Richard Wilbur wrote the foreword to Rose Kelleher's book. He says:"Rose Kelleher's poems are everywhere the work of a sharp intelligence, a good heart, and a great technical gift...."He ends further enthusiastic comments with this one:
"And it makes me happy to think how much Anthony Hecht would have relished her work."

I am convinced that Richard Wilbur is right.

More than mere formality
This book proved quite timely for me, because I've been thinking a lot lately about the use of form in poetry. Is it too late to write formal verse? Is it folly not to? Nobody, from Chaucer to the "neoformalists," uses form more naturally than Rose. In most of her poems, the burden of our age-old poetic tradition just melts away into a completely authentic and earnest voice. Her formal and "informal" poems feel the same, equally comfortable, equally assured, some on the border between the two worlds (which are one in her poetry, in case I haven't hammered on this point enough yet).

At first I thought her section headings were a bit facile, but now I'm getting great pleasure from comparing her approaches to these Great Topics. For instance, she seems to be much more at home writing about God and Science than she is writing about People (at which point she strikes me a bit like a foreign correspondent, but one of the good ones).

For all my praise, I haven't really given you a reason to get this book yet. Get it for Rose herself, or at least the Rose that speaks these poems. She is the life of the party: smart, sardonic, unafraid of demons but also not one to overdramatize them. She is insightful but not in the formulaic way of the School of Quietude, i.e., observing a scene and pulling some metaphorical lesson from it. No, she is more likely to redefine it altogether, if she even confines herself to a single scene. She feels just as free to widen the scope to an entire history, or a life, or a movie, or... whatever she thinks of next. And that's what keeps you turning the page, because the further you get into this book, the more you will crave the next product of her untamed, unfair, irreverent mind.

A New and Powerful Voice
Rose Kelleher is a formal poet, one of the best of her generation, though little known until now outside the narrow confines of formalism.

Wilbur is right to mention her technical gift. Craftsmanship characterises her work.

The overall quality is impressive: there are no clunkers at all, as far as I can see. I can't say the same of any other poetry book I've read in recent years.

Kelleher's acerbic wit enlivens the collection but fails to conceal the empathy and humanity that shine throughout her work.

Here are two fine and characteristic sonnets from the collection:


Rays at Cape Hatteras

The cownose rays are showing off today.
They flip themselves like flapjacks over pans
of Carolina surf, and when one lands,
the splat reverberates a mile away.
Sometimes you see the backs of their whale-gray
pectoral fins, outstretched like flipper-hands;
or else they show their bellies as they dance,
white slabs with grins carved out, as if from clay.
In great outlays of energy, they burst
through breakers, moved by some instinctive wish
to flounder in the air. Their flight is brief
and clumsy, evolution having cursed
these would-be herons with the flesh of fish:
rude fliers in the face of disbelief.


Neanderthal Bone Flute
"...if it really is a flute, it provides significant evidence that Neanderthals may have been the equal of Homo Sapiens in the evolution of humankind."
-- [...], Divje Babe

Let it be a flute. Let some young man,
perhaps red-haired, have carved it just for fun.
Or better yet, to serenade someone:
one of the jut-chinned girls, not of his clan,
a stranger from the east. And let his genes
thrive still in solitary types, the shy
who fidget when you look them in the eye,
the tongue-tied, who must woo by other means.

Ignore the new genetic tests that say
the girl rejected him, that winter came
and spear could not compete with bow and arrow;
that want, or slaughter, whittled him away
because his ways and ours were not the same.
Let bone be flute, the music in our marrow.

Awesome!!!
Bundle O'Tinder has brought poetry to a higher level. The poems are ingenious, with each one a masterpiece in itself. Thank you Rose Kelleher for a new glimpse into the beauty of the world, people and God. ... Read more

Product Description
Divided 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".Amazon.com Review
Flight Among the Tombs, Anthony Hecht's sixth book of poemspublished since 1954, shows one of America's foremost poets working at thetop of his form. Part scholar, part circus ringmaster, Hecht calls ourattention to three rings of his erudition: classical wit, Renaissanceenergy, and contemporary doubt. A fragment of Christopher Smart providesthe book's title, but George Herbert, in whose clever prosodic vineyardsHecht has long labored, casts the book's longest shadow. The first halfcontains lyrical poems in which Death--both scythe-hauling figure andphysical phenomenon--speaks as the central character inside a collage ofmasks: carnival barker, film director, society lady, member of the HarlemGuild of St. Luke, and, of course, poet. Hilarious and creepy, the poemscombine Hecht's late-modernist sense of ironic humor with an orchestra ofLatin and Renaissance conceits, stripping away the latter's theology toexpress a very inclusive mortality. Yet Hecht, whose deep humanity preventsthese poems from becoming mere set pieces of the macabre, turns thismessage of doom into a call to enjoy the unpredictable in life, as thespeaker watching aristocrats dine says in "Death the Mexican Revolutionary,"

We recommend the quail,
Which you'd do well to eat
Before your powers fail,
For I inaugurate
A brand-new social order
Six cold, decisive feet
South of the border.

Customer Reviews (1)

Another stunning collection from Hecht
Hecht has to be one of the greatest living poets we have, and Flight Among the Tombs is another example of this. It is chiefly a sequence of poems where Death speaks as or through someone else. It is a powerful sequence of poems set with wood engravings Leonard Baskin. The combination is stunning. The section section of the book is a few poems added, I'm guessing, to make this a book-length collection. Luckily, with a poet of Hecht's caliber, the filler poems are just as good as the main portion of the book. ... Read more

Product Description
The 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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

BIBLICAL THEMES TOUCHING THE REAL WORLD POETICALLY
Outstanding masterpiece using many Biblical themes and events to convey the paradox of God's Light in the Darkness of a cursed world, alluding to Creation & Fall in Genesis 1-3.

Just two poems are worth the price of the entire volume:
SACRIFICE - ABRAHAM; SAUL & DAVID.

Excerpts:
Abraham -

Three promises he gave/Came like three kings or angels to my door:His purposes concealed/In coiled and kerneled store/
He planted as a seedling that would yield/In my enfeebled years/
A miracle that would command my tears/With piercings of the grave.
"Old man, behold creation,"/Said the Lord, "the leaping hills,
the thousand-starred/Heavens and watery floors./ Is anything too
hard/For the Lord, Who shut all seas within their doors?"

Saul & David -

A shepherd boy, but goodly to look upon/
Unnoticed but God-favored,sturdy of limb/
As Michelangelo later imagined him,/
Comely even in his frown./

Shall a mere shepherd provide the cure of kings?/
Heaven itself delights in ironies such/
As this, in which a boy's fingers would touch/
Pythagorean strings/

And by a modal artistry assemble/
The very Sons of Morning, the ranked and choired/
Heavens in sweet laudation of the Lord/
And make Saul cease to tremble.

Simply magnificent. A tour de force. Mr Hecht simply gets better with age, like a fine Merlot. Bon Apetit!

The Great and the Jejeune
Twenty-five years ago the novelist John Fowles published a truly silly essay in which he argued that lyric poetry is the exclusive province of the young. He cited Keats and Shelley to make his point. I was just a kid when I read it, but my reaction was "Shoemaker, stick to your lath." Among the lyric poets I most admired were Pindar and Po Chu-I, Horace and Hardy, men who had done extraordinary work into their eighties. Even then I longed for the reflections of those who "spit into the teeth of Time that has transfigured me," in Yeats' memorable phrase.

With the appearance of The Darkness and the Light, I have another great old man to read. Here are one of the half-dozen greatest villanelles in our language, the most vicious, wittiest flyting since Burns sank beneath the sod, the "Sarabande at Age 77," and the title poem, which I first read one week after my octogenarian father succumbed in the wan, morning light. Fellow Amazonians, I'd say this is the most important book of English verse to appear since Wilbur gave us his collected poems in 1988. Buy it. Read it. Memorize it.

the latest from hecht
Hecht's verse is always a pleasure to read. You see his intelligence, formal skill, and love of language in his poems. "Nocturne" is Hecht's succesful villanelle, which is one of my favorite formal types of poems, and when it is well done, and it is well done here, it can be one of the most successful forms of poetry. bravo mr. hecht. "Sacrifice" also sticks out in the book. it is a poem in three parts, juxtaposing the story of abraham and isaac with an incident in 1945, which is just chilling. hecht has several successful translations. I was dissapointed in the lack of war poems, which few do better than hecht, and the overabundance of religous poems. the dual picture on the cover lead me to believe that the subject of this collection would be both wwii and religion. i would hope next time knopf would do better in designing the cover. ... Read more

Product Description
In these engaging lectures, the eminent poet Anthony Hecht explores the art of poetry in its own right and in relation to the other fine arts. While the problems he treats entail both philosophic and theoretical discussion, he never allows abstract speculation to overshadow his respect for and delight in the written texts that he introduces --or in the specific examples of painting and music to which he refers. After discussing the links between literature (with special reference to poetry) and painting, and between literature and music, Hecht investigates the theme of paradise and wilderness, especially but not exclusively in The Tempest. He then turns to the question of public and private art: the ways in which all the arts participate in "equivocal and curious balances between private and public modes of discourse,"between an exclusive or elitist role and the openly political. Beginning with a discussion of architecture as an illustration of a more general theme of discord and balance, the penultimate lecture probes the inner contradictions of works of art and our reactions to them. The sixth and final piece concerns art and morality, especially the issues involved in public funding of the arts.

In writing this book, Anthony Hecht draws on his years of experience as a practicing poet. His books of poems include A Summoning of Stones, Millions of Strange Shadows, The Venetian Vespers, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hard Hours. Most recently he has written The Hidden Law, a critical study of W. H. Auden. ... Read more

Product Description
A vibrant and thought-provoking survey of recorded jazz from its beginnings to the present. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

A Tribute from a Fan
Jiggery, Pokery
"Jiggery Pokery"
Dactyl compendium
Self-conscious art

Volume of poems whose
Hexasyllabical
Genre was shaped by two
Dons at the start.

Not profound or moving vese, just fun to read and hard to write.
Hecht is the originator of the prose form known as the double dactyl. They are eight lines in length, broken into two groups of four. The last line of the first quatrain rhymes with the last line of the second. All the lines except the rhyming one are composed of two dactylic feet. The first line must be a double dactylic nonsense line like "Higgledy-piggledy" or "Jiggery Pokery." The second line must be a double dactylic name and somewhere in the poem, preferably in the antepenultimate (second line of the second quatrain) there must be one double dactylic line which is one word long.
This book is a collection of examples of this form of prose, and some examples are:

Higgledy-piggledy
Andrea Doria
Lives in the name of this
Glorious boat.

As I sit writing these
Non-navigational
Verses a -crash! Bang! Blurp!
Glub" . . . (end of quote).

Higgledy-piggledy
Pico Mirandola
In the Academy
Works with a will;

With what a verve he gets
Neoplatonical
Since a philanthropist's
Footing the bill!

I enjoyed this form and after trying to write them myself, realized how difficult it is to create them. Poetry that appears nonsensical yet has some meaning is very difficult to do and Hecht is to be commended for creating this form. It is not profound or loaded with metaphysical meaning, but it sure is fun to read.

double-dactylically
Higgledy Piggeldy
Amazon Booksellers,
Why do charge me so
Much for your books?!

Price as to increase your
Marketability--
Because right now, I think
You are all crooks.

Joseph E. Rizzolo
(It's nice having a name that fits the meter, as it enables you to write poems about yourself)

Any fans of light poetry e.g. limericks will love this book.The writers epitomize the uber-academic approach taken by so many literary elitists, which appeals to my own betimes elitist character.For those of you unfamiliar with the form, the rules go like this:

1. Eight lines of verse in two stanzas. 2. Lines 1-3 and 5-7 are double dactyls. 3. Lines 4 and 8 are single dactyls with an added beat, and rhyme. 4. Line 1 is nonsensical 5. Line 2 is a proper noun 6. Either line 6 or line 7 must be a single-word double dactyl (e.g. "anthropoligical") 7. (my favorite rule) No single word double dactyl may be used in another poem. Ever. By anyone.

Sound tough to pen?I've tried it many a time, and I think I've come up with two poems that reflect any merit.The challenge of the form is partly what makes a clever and well executed result so much fun.

Why only four stars?The authors seem to believe that rule number 7 makes the form finite (which is perhaps why the book is out of print), that the limited number of double dactyl words in the English language will be consumed and ultimately doom the form to oblivion.There's no rule that demands that ACTUAL words endorsed by the likes of Noah Webster be used, which rather threatens the ephemeral nature of the form.Some of my best work includes words of my own smithing like 'posttransubstantiate' and 'jiggliectomy' (the removal of breast implants).

If you ever find a copy, buy it....

Oh, by the way; I already used the above words in my own work.So ha.

Inspired Nonsense: Shakespeare Couldn't Have Done It Better
No doubt pressed to "publish or perish," Hecht and Hollander not only invented their own poetic form, but then, in one slim volume introduced it, perfected it, and then exhausted it; all with the utmost respect for academic propriety. I first encountered it more years ago than I care to remember on the two-dollar shelf. It is a gem which should stand with the classics: The Elements of Style, King Lear, The Little Engine That Could.

The rules for the art form invented by these two neglected geniuses (well, English professors) are simple, but hellishly difficult to honor.Each verse starts with a nonsense double-dactyl (a double-dactyl sounds like something you might run across in Jurassic Park, and is just about as difficult to tame). The second line of the first verse must be a double-dactylic proper name, and the antepenultimate line must be a single double-dactylic word. With so few good double-dactylic words to go around, it's easy to see how the form was so quickly exhausted.(It's been at least sixteen years since I last read the book, but if memory serves, one additional rule is that each double-dactyl can be used but once, and then it must be retired from use in the form forever.)

Without the "cannon" in hand, it's impossible to fully report all the rules.Perhaps the best way to understand and to illustrate the form is simply to quote the masters:

Jiggery-Pokery
Anthony Hollander
Two bards in one
Worked their brains in a storm

Thinking up words for the
Antepenultimate
line of this
doubly difficult form.

Sixteen years on and THAT sticks with me still!If you should run across a copy of this inspired classic gathering dust on a back library shelf somewhere, first, do the right thing: offer to buy it.If that doesn't work, borrow it; but DON'T EVER RETURN IT! ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
In this text - the result of a life-long critical and imaginative engagement with Auden's works - Anthony Hecht identifies and traces consistent habits of thought and belief within the poet's extensive and varied writings and through his celebrated conversions and repudiations. Anthony Hecht is the author of six volumes of poetry, for which he has received the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize and the Prix de Rome, among other honours. He has served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. ... Read more