Customer Reviews

The Darkness and the Light: Poems

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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.

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!

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.