Review by Booklist Review
No living American poet is more eminent than Wilbur, as Steve Kowit respectfully but hilariously acknowledges in his poem (in The Dumbbell Nebula, reviewed in this section) about looking like Wilbur. Except for two elegant translations, every poem in Wilbur's first collection since New and Selected Poems (1989) is short and ever so sweet. A sublime formal poet, whose rhymes and meters chime their music, Wilbur continues his love affair with plants in "Zea," which watches a field of corn decline after harvest, and in "Signatures," which admires the herb false Solomon's seal. He still takes wondering pleasure in the human habit of likening things, as in "Crow's Nests," in which denuded treetops appear as so many ships' masts. As a now senior bard, he is entitled to dispense Robert Frost^-like aphorisms, such as "A Short History," a couplet that explains civilization; to hail the pleasures of marital congress in "For C"; and, in "Mayflies," to feel a bit religious about mortality. This is the work of a master. --Ray Olson
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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). (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Eleven years have passed since Richard Wilbur won his second Pulitzer Prize for New and Collected Poems. In the years that followed, devotees of his formalist verse have scoured poetry periodicals to find the former US Poet Laureate's sporadically published poetry. The 26 original poems and translations collected in this new volume live up to the expectations that follow such a celebrated master, and they treat readers to the pleasures of self-consciously crafted lyric verse. Thematically, the poems are loosely linked together by explorations of the paradoxical relationship between the comfortable stability of memory and the imperative uncertainty of the present moment. Wilbur's expert versification reveals this mystery to be part of everyday experience: 'This Pleasing Anxious Being' mines the memories of childhood to grasp for fleeting moments of security, while 'Icons' searches for permanence behind the carefully constructed images of celebrities. The lyric translations of French, Romanian, and Bulgarian poets also echo this theme, perhaps most poignantly in Valeri Petrov's struggle with memories of friends hanged by the Nazis during WWII. In addition to the lyric translations, carefully crafted translations of Molire's prologue to Amphitryon and a canto of Dante's Inferno are presented. The title poem suggests that the joyful capture of these transcendent moments is the poet's calling, and here, to the great delight of his readers, Wilbur once again demonstrates his mastery of seeing and reproducing such moments. The graceful combination of virtuoso formal verse and fully matured wisdom produces a tightly woven group of poems and translations that reinforce Wilbur's standing as one of the great poetic craftsmen of the 20th century.
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