Plundered Hearts New and Selected Poems

J. D. McClatchy, 1945-

Book - 2014

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Subjects
Published
New York : Alfred A. Knopf 2014.
Language
English
Main Author
J. D. McClatchy, 1945- (-)
Edition
First Edition
Physical Description
261 pages ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780385351515
9780804168755
  • New Poems
  • My Hand Collection
  • Three Poems by Wilhelm Müller
  • Prelude, Delay, and Epitaph
  • The Novelist
  • One Year Later
  • Wolf's Trees
  • Bacon's Easel
  • Palm Beach Sightings
  • Kiss Kiss
  • My Robotic Prostatectomy
  • Two Arias from The Marriage of Figaro
  • His Own Life
  • Cagaloglu
  • from Scenes from Another Life | 1981
  • Aubade
  • A Winter Without Snow
  • The Tears of the Pilgrims
  • from Stars Principal | 1986
  • At a Reading
  • The Cup
  • Anthem
  • The Palace Dwarf
  • A Cold in Venice
  • The Lesson in Prepositions
  • Bees
  • Hummingbird
  • Ovid's Farewell
  • from The Rest of the Way | 1990
  • Medea in Tokyo
  • The Rented House
  • The Shield of Herakles
  • Fog Tropes
  • Heads
  • An Essay on Friendship
  • The Window
  • Kilim
  • from Ten Commandments | 1998
  • The Ledger
  • My Sideshow
  • My Early Hearts
  • My Old Idols
  • My Mammogram
  • Found Parable
  • Tea With the Local Saint
  • Under Hydra
  • Auden's OED
  • What They Left Behind
  • Proust in Bed
  • Three Dreams About Elizabeth Bishop
  • Late Night Ode
  • from Hazmat | 2002
  • Fado
  • Glanum
  • Jihad
  • Orchid
  • Cancer
  • Penis
  • Tattoos
  • The Agave
  • The Fever
  • The Infection
  • Late Afternoon, Rome
  • The Bookcase
  • Hotel Bar
  • A Tour of the Volcano
  • Little Elegy
  • Ouija
  • from Mercury Dressing | 2009
  • Mercury Dressing
  • Er
  • Self-Portrait as Amundsen
  • The Frame
  • Resignation
  • Sorrow in 1944
  • Lingering Doubts
  • Three Overtures
  • Trees, Walking
  • Going Back to Bed
  • Full Cause of Weeping
  • A View of the Sea
  • Notes
  • Acknowledgments
Review by New York Times Review

McClatchy is a poet of elegant reflection who, in careful lines and forms, takes the measure of the present in relation to the past. For him, form is a prerequisite, supercharging words with meaning and history to make poetry. Throughout the six previous collections from which this volume draws, McClatchy has honored the Greek and Roman classics as well as the midcentury poets - Lowell, Bishop and James Merrill - who were his mentors and models. He chronicles gay life in the last half-century, its lust, love and illness, with dark, understated humor, as in the new poem "My Robotic Prostatectomy": "So what did they cut out of me?/My past? The source of the little death/Clenched at the climax of one/Of the few unambiguous pleasures." He comprehends the present in terms of mythology and history: The "plague in Athens" that "hurried its descent/By fear" becomes a figure for his own mother's cancer. In McClatchy's new poems, he makes uneasy peace with his aging body: "The gouging ingrown nail is to be removed./The shots supposed to have pricked and burned/The nerves diabetes has numbed never notice," he writes, finding a gross beauty in decay. An important editor and a prolific opera librettist, McClatchy is a standard-bearer for high culture. Yet while his poems cast wide referential nets and revel in other voices and times, they don't require a Ph.D. to enjoy. McClatchy's voice is intimate, vulnerable, close to the heart. He reminds us to attend to "the carousel of slides we call a lifetime," which, for him, depict powerful experiences and profound encounters with art in equal measure.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 14, 2014]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

"You who read this too will die./ None loved his life as much as I," we read early in this big, sometimes stark, sometimes surprising new volume, the first U.S. selected and seventh volume of poems from the urbane, serious poet, editor, critic, and librettist (Hazmat). Certainly it confirms his place in a line of deft writers adroit with inherited forms, with complex sentences, with modern love (especially same-sex love): W.H. Auden and James Merrill, Ovid and Horace, Anthony Hecht, and Elizabeth Bishop receive homage direct and indirect. A crown of sonnets, a copious knowledge of opera, blank verse, syllabics, trimeter couplets, and intricate stanzas make the book a kind of cyclopedia of forms. Yet the poems-especially the newer ones-also show what sets McClatchy apart: "What happens when the language is a mask/ And the words we use to hush this up have failed?" Deciding "the poem always has a shadow/ Under its reliefs," betraying his adult reserve "With that singular lack of shame only a kid commands," in narrative verse and in epigrams, McClatchy concedes the frailty of the body, the frangibility and the stubbornness of desire, making him a poet of modern mortality (as in the new poem "My Robotic Prostatectomy"). It is an unflinching, uncommonly serious as well as a technically careful performance. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

This lengthy "definitive selection" spans three decades of McClatchy's career-six published volumes of verse as well as new, uncollected poems. A prodigious editor (Yale Review), translator, author of 13 opera libretti, and Yale University professor, McClatchy is a disciple of W.H. Auden and James Merrill. He departs from their formal subtleties, however, with a confessional flourish that writes gay sexuality into the human drama, depicting "love's brutal task/ And the overmastered scream it ends in." Some strong poems involve body parts: a Palestinian goat head vendor, a science center heart large enough to stand in, a diabetes-numbed toe, a collection of hands, the penis through history. McClatchy's favorite meter is not rhymed pentameter but syllabics, a looser counted form derived from the classical Greek and Latin poetry he adores. When estranged lovers in a rented house can feed a feral cat but not each other, the poem's backdrop is an opera of wailing animals so well orchestrated that one can almost agree that "without suffering, life would be unbearable." VERDICT A collection of rough, erudite meditations on the betrayals of the body in youth and age that will appeal to McClatchy fans and sophisticated readers of poetry. [See "What's Coming for National Poetry Month in April?" Prepub Alert, 11/18/13.]-Ellen Kaufman, New York (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.