In 1989 Richard Wilbur published New and Collected Poems, a landmark volume that won that year's Pulitzer Prize. Now, ten years later, he has prepared a collection of all the poetry he has written in the intervening years, together with new translations of Molière (from Amphitryon) and Dante. These twenty-five poems reaffirm Wilbur's stature as one of our greatest living masters of verse.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Richard Wilbur, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his New and Collected Poems, has occasionally been pilloried for the twin sins of being too immaculate and too optimistic a poet. (Randall Jarrell, for example, noted that he "obsessively sees, and shows, the bright underside of every dark thing.") But surely these are peccadilloes when measured against Wilbur's formal mastery and unsentimental pathos. Both qualities are on display in Mayflies, which collects his work of the 1990s. Not surprisingly, there are more than a few gestures toward mortality, starting with the title poem's evocation of "those lifelong dancers of a day":
In somber forest, when the sun was low,There is, perhaps, an extra quotient of Frost-like gloom to some of the work here. And indeed, "A Wall in the Woods: Cummington" seems like a deliberate updating of Frost's Yankee pastoralism, although Wilbur imparts an elegance all his own: "What is it for, now that dividing neither / Farm from farm nor field from field, it runs / Through deep impartial woods, and is trangressed / By boughs of pine or beech from either side?" Here and there Wilbur runs out of steam, or bogs down in his own gentility. But he's an appropriately flinty mouthpiece for Dante in "Canto XXV of the Inferno," which originally appeared in a 1998 round-robin translation, and poems like "For C." or "Icons" or "Fabrications" show him at the top of his game. Formalism could hardly find a more accomplished figure for its standard-bearer, and like the spider web that Wilbur celebrates in the latter poem, Mayflies handily demonstrates "the bright resilience of the frailest form." --James Marcus
I saw from unseen pools a mist of flies
In their quadrillions rise
And animate a ragged patch of glow
With sudden glittering...
From Publishers Weekly
Two-time Pulitzer-winner Wilbur remains America's reigning master of poems in traditional forms, creating flawless, balanced, charming and even profound couplets, sonnets, sapphics, and intricately custom-made stanzas. This first volume since the 1989 New and Selected brings together 22 new poems, six renderings of lyric poems from French, Romanian and Bulgarian, and two longer verse translations--from Moliere's Amphitryon and Dante's Inferno. The new short poems (many of which have appeared in the New Yorker) include some of Wilbur's best. The touching, clever and Frostian "A Barred Owl" shows how the owl's cry ("Who Cooks for you?") can soothe or disturb, depending on circumstance and interpretation; "At Moorditch" accomplishes a brief and visionary defense of imagination. Several poems apply Wilbur's careful sensibility to the rigors of tanka and haiku. Wilbur admires order, control and grace while looking toward the voids and terrors they counteract: the couplets in "Crows' Nest" give new life to the old figure of maturity as a bare field, while the extended "This Pleasing, Anxious Being" looks back on remembered childhood with the apprehensions and glimmerings of old age. In "For C." Wilbur finds in a long happy marriage the virtues we might ascribe to his own verse: "A passion joined to courtesy and art/ Which has the quality of something made/ Like a good fiddle, like the rose's scent,/ Like a rose window or the firmament." (Apr.) FYI: Wilbur's Responses: Prose Pieces 1953-1976 was reissued last month in an expanded edition (Story Line, $16.95 paper 352p ISBN 1-885266-82-0).
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Master craftsman,
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This review is from: Mayflies: New Poems and Translations (Hardcover)
It is a pleasure to read the work of Richard Wilbur and to know that, nearly eighty, he is still capable of writing graceful, elegant poems that both move and enlighten. Aside from a number of short formal poems, this collection offers recent, delightful translations of Dante and Moliere.One feels better knowing that poets like Wilbur are still toiling in the formal vineyards, producing such lovely and accessible works as these.
10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wilbur's new book perhaps his best,
By A Customer
This review is from: Mayflies: New Poems and Translations (Hardcover)
His latest book of poms is showing Richard Wilbur in top form as ever. America's greatest living poet, and one of her greatest ever, Wilbur is back with all his themes of metaphysics and love, able to use all forms and tones with ease. Light poems, serious poems, there's something here for everyone.
11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
from Maine,
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This review is from: Mayflies: New Poems and Translations (Hardcover)
The title poem in this volume is worth the price of the entire book. No, a hundred, a thousand times that. One should memorize that poem for those times when one's soul is as dry as a chip of cured wood.
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First Sentence:
The warping night air having brought the boom Of and owl's voice into her darkened room, We tell the wakened child that all she heard Was an odd question from a forest bird, Asking of us, if rightly listened to, "Who cooks for you?" and then "Who cooks for you?" Read the first page New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
The warping night air having brought the boom Of and owl's voice into her darkened room, We tell the wakened child that all she heard Was an odd question from a forest bird, Asking of us, if rightly listened to, "Who cooks for you?" and then "Who cooks for you?" Read the first page New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 7
books:
See all 7 books this book cites
- Walking to Sleep by Richard Wilbur in Front Matter
- The Flowers of Evil (Oxford World's Classics) by Charles Baudelaire in Back Matter
- Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray in Back Matter
- White Goddess by Robert Graves in Back Matter
- More Opposites by Richard Wilbur in Front Matter
See all 7 books this book cites
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