Poetry

This is Donald Hall's most advanced works extending his poetic reach even beyond his recent volumes, The One Day and Old and New Poems. Conflict dominates this book, and conflict unites it. Hall takes poetry as an instrument for revelation and discovery, whether in "Another Elegy, " a comic, pathetic portrait of a (fictional) contemporary poet, or in "Baseball, " in which a narrator called K.C. (swinging his bat from the Mudville of the poet's desk) fantastically attempts to explain the all-American game to a long-dead German artist. "Baseball" occupies nine innings, each inning composed of nine stanzas, each stanza composed of nine lines, each line composed of nine syllables. The title series of poems, "The Museum of Clear Ideas, " imitates, but does not translate, the first book of the Odes of Horace. A cool, witty voice identifies itself as Horace Horsecollar, an old Walt Disney character; yet no sooner does one voice establish itself than another voice contradicts it. By such means are ideas exhibited and clarified. The book's final section, "Extra Innings, " moves with terrible poignancy to questions about the end of the game, each inning adding another stanza, each stanza another line, each line another syllable, until the game is over. The Museum of Clear Ideas, exalting artifice, breaks beyond artifice to the heart of reality. As Thom Gunn wrote of Hall's The One Day, "It is one of those books, like Elizabeth Bishop's last collection, which alters the way we look at the jumbled contents of the poetic career preceding it, giving it retrospectively a shape, a pattern, a consistency it didn't seem to have at the time."

"In the Night Watch Poems, B. G. Donohue finds the wide chinks of light in the dark.. These are powerful, complex and beautiful, perfectly measured and crafted. In his search for the Divine, Donohue discovers a fertile ground." - Colum McCann, National Book Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, Pushcart Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, et.al. Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing, Hunter College

The standard translation into modern English of Homer's Odyssey. "The best translation there is of a great, perhaps the greatest, poet."-- "New York Times Book Review" "The best translation there is of a great, perhaps, the greatest poet."--Rex Warner, "New York Times Book Review"

"This is the best Odyssey in modern English."--Gilbert HighetA

"Lattimore's translation of Homer's "Odyssey" is the most eloquent, persuasive and imaginative I have seen. It reads as if the poem had originally been written in English."--Paul EngleA

"A landmark in the history of modern translation....Lattimore has reanimated Homer for this generaiton, and perhaps for other generations to come." "--Times Literary Supplement (London)"

These are the poems of a Christian pilgrim, a mercurial, twenty-first century believer-priest who characterizes himself, from the outset, as a highly problematic nomad. Poem after poem suggests that, in our postmodern era, one's identity, if ungrounded in the eternal Word, may yield at best either a vanishing semblance of macroscopic reality or its probabilistic trace. That, of course, is the predicament confronted by any compulsive wanderer--a crisis as perceptual in its implications as it is spiritual. Yet the lyrics in On the Care and Feeding of Robots never seek to celebrate a static reality. In other words, here, it is far more than the romantic desire for permanence that agitates the speaker; rather, it is fear of the imminent loss of his spacewalker's dream life that unsettles him. To live as a shuttle astronaut in a universe without access to its numinous meanings is to exist as no more than a ghostly qwiff--a wave ripple in a virtual world.