The Darkness and the Light: Poems [Hardcover]

Anthony Hecht (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 12, 2001

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Look deep into my eyes. Think to yourself,/ `There is "the fringŠd curtain" where a play/ will shortly be enacted.' Look deep down/ into the pupil. Think, `I am going to sleep.'" While a certain kind of play is certainly being enacted in this eighth collection (since Hecht's 1954's debut A Summoning of Stones), few readers will have the latter reaction. Hecht's has always tempered his fussy, Edward Gorey-like diction with camp-destroying earnest allusion, wry humor ("the ring-a-ding Ding-an-Sich") and a palpable sense of entitlement. These 44 short lyrics are quintessential late work alternatingly fiery and melancholy, looking back over past darkness and strife to a promise of light and rest, and to a personal pantheon (Baudelaire, Horace, Goethe) represented here in nine translations. Yet the book is cohesive in theme, keeping to the shadowlands throughout poems like the Dickinson nod "A Certain Slant" ("the smooth cool plunder of celestial fire") and the crashing "Witness": "The ocean rams itself in pitched assault/ And spastic rage to which there is no halt;/ Foam-white brigades collapse; but the huge host/ Has infinite reserves." Such reserves are not quite accessible to the poet here, but Hecht, with his baroque rhyme and forceful diction, operates as if they were. (June 28)Forecast: Former Academy of American Poets chancellor Hecht won the Poetry Society of America's prestigious Frost Medal last year and the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for The Hard Hours. In the last decade he delivered the prestigious Mellon lectures in poetry, which became 1995's On the Laws of Poetic Art. Longtime fans will seek out any book by this never-overpublishing poet; a revision of 1990's Collected Earlier Poems seems imminent.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Hecht's (Flight Among the Tombs, The Hard Hours) refreshing and liberating verse possesses a quality that transcends both time and space. In his eighth book of poetry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet pulls the reader into an ocean that "rams itself in pitched assault/ And spastic rage to which there is no halt;/ Foam-white brigades collapse; but the huge host/ Has infinite reserves." It is his striking use of "r" and "o" sounds, creating a cadence of rising and falling within the meter of the line ("against the enormous rocks of a rough coast") that demonstrates Hecht's linguistic control. In the past, Hecht has revealed the scope of his craft in his quality translations of Horace, Baudelaire, and Goethe; here, he pays homage to his predecessors by bringing to light the strong connection between contemporary and biblical themes in such poems as "Sacrifice" and "The Road to Damascus." An exceptional book of poetry, Hecht's latest endeavor is highly recommended for all poetry collections. Tim Gavin, Episcopal Acad., Merion, PA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 80 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (June 12, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375411941
• ISBN-13: 978-0375411946
• Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 0.5 x 8.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,116,014 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Great and the Jejeune, July 13, 2001

By 

Timothy Murphy (Fargo ND) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Darkness and the Light: Poems (Hardcover)

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars BIBLICAL THEMES TOUCHING THE REAL WORLD POETICALLY, October 24, 2001

By 

B.D. (Rancho San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Darkness and the Light: Poems (Hardcover)

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!

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars the latest from hecht, June 12, 2001

By 

[e-mail] "[e-mail]" (Beaumont, tx USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Darkness and the Light: Poems (Hardcover)

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.