Customer Reviews

Mayflies: New Poems and Translations

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Richard Wilbur, our best living poet of the formal (and yes, often rhyming!) mode, is still writing wonderfully complex, insightful poems. He can be compared to March King John Philip Sousa, who also embraced a formal genre which other composers may have found stultifying. It is evidence of the time-defying talents of both men that their later work is as fresh and engaging as the efforts of their youth, and as unlimited by the highly structured forms they both chose. People hearing a Sousa march today are as taken with its infectious high spirits as those who heard it a hundred years ago. I believe that Wilbur's poems will prove as moving and as enduring. The best poem is the title work, "Mayflies." As a Lay Carmelite I especially savor the lines, "...called to be/ Not fly or star/ But one whose task is joyfully to see/ How fair the fiats of the caller are." Read this life-enhancing poem, and draw nearer to the Caller who created stars and mayflies, and poets too!

Richard Wilbur is the acknowledged living master of formal verse. That means he works in good old-fashioned meter and rhyme. His fans will not be disappointed by this volume, except for its slimness.

If you don't have it already, I recommend his Pulitzer-winning NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS, of which this volume is really just a continuation. MAYFLIES has a healthy dose of translations, including an entire canto of Dante's INFERNO (strange) and scene of Moliere's AMPHITRYON (hilarious!). If there is an over-riding theme, it is of changes and transformations, mostly metaphorical, rather than the Ovidian physical sort.

Wilbur continues harvesting Robert Frost's crops, with several poems about nature and even one about a country wall. The nature poems are mixed with epigrams and lyrics lest you forget that Wilbur can do it all.

My one objection is that this collection really is slim, just 75 pages, much of which is translation. Those on a budget should hold out for a paperback edition, or get the NEW AND COLLECTED.

Poems in the New Yorker are usually ignored, but "Mayflies" stood out from the page. "--with sudden glittering, as when a group of stars appear in a brief gap of black and driven cloud -----" or "I saw from unseen pools a mist of flies in their quadrillions rise" or "---the pistons in some bright machine---". I think this is the best poem in the English language, better even than A.E. Houseman's "The Cherry Tree". Both short poems take us from a beautiful image into the life of the writer. To see Wilbur's great talent of expressing so much with just a few words, his translation of Baudelaire's "Albatross" should be compared with the original. Amazingly beautiful economy, enough to make the French poet jealous.

This book is 77 pp., half its pages are blank, and it lists for $22. The quality of its poems is uneven; one, "The Gambler," is banal. I'm disappointed in my favorite poet and more so in his publisher.

It would do us all good to occasionally take some time out to read poetry. Words, with their subtle and differing meanings in combination are the backbone of civilization and in the hands of a master can generate so many different emotions. This collection, not all of which are by Richard Wilbur, are shining examples of the craft and art of poetry. Each moved me in different ways every time I read them, demonstrating the he is indeed worthy of his Pulitzer Prize. I highly recommend it for your poetic interludes.

Mayflies served as a reminder to me of the power of poetry...language at its most intense.

You owe yourself the treat of a poemlover's lifetime by getting and reading and re-reading this masterful collection by one of the Grandmasters of American poetry. Also get his Collected Poems of 1989 which won the Pulitzer. No one has equalled his unparalleled achievement of continuing the great poetic gift and tradition: if any mortal were able to synthesize the best of Wordsworth, Keats, William Cullen Bryant, Longfellow, Tennyson, Emerson, Hardy, Yeats, Frost, E.A.Robinson, Wilfred Owen, Robert Bridges, A.E.Housman, Santayana's sonnets, while setting his own standard of distinct, engaging style and power,we would classify that as genius. So Wilbur is and has consistently been. He is the standard-bearer for the New Formalist revival and should be acknowledged as the main inspiration for much of the excellence that is finding its way into the hands of eager readers today: A.E.Stallings, Gjertrud Schnackenburg, Timothy Steele, Rhina Espaillat, Dana Gioia,John Hollander, Canadian poet Fred Cogswell, among noteworthy others. In the words of Yeats: ' Though the great song return no more/ There's keen delight in what we brave/The rattle of pebbles on the shore/Under the receding wave'; and '(Poets)have no gift to set a statesman right/He has had enough of meddling who can please/A young girl in the innocence of her youth,/Or the elderly upon a winter's night' And in the words of John Masefield, British Poet Laureate 1930-67 'The story-tellers beyond price/Bringing the news from Paradise/ Those from whose handiwork we see/Horizons in eternity.' Bon apetit true poetry lovers everywhere!