The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • In his centenary year, this volume of the Pulitzer Prize winner and former poet laureate’s poems celebrates the indispensable artistry of a writer who faced the history of his era with a “clear-eyed mercy toward human weakness” (The New York Times Book Review) and was hailed in his day as “the best poet writing in English” (Joseph Brodsky).This volume brings together for the first time all of the poems that appeared in Anthony Hecht’s seven trade collections, from
A Summoning of Stones of 1954 through to
The Darkness and the Light of 2001; it adds the remarkable work contained in his posthumously issued
Interior Skies:
Late Poems from Liguria of 2011; and it rounds this out with the best of the many poems which were left uncollected at the time of his death in 2004, the earliest dating from 1950 and the latest from 2001. Including the woodcuts by Leonard Baskin that accompanied some of his pieces through the years,
Collected Poems brings us the full sweep of the experience and artistry of Anthony Hecht, who, as an infantryman in World War II, bore witness to the shaping events of his time, which continue to shape our own.
As the editor Philip Hoy states in his introduction: “Anthony Hecht once wrote that poems can allow us to contemplate our ‘sweetest triumphs’ and our ‘deepest desolations,’ and by employing ‘the manifold devices of art’ to recover for us what he memorably called ‘the inexhaustible plenitude of the world.’ The work gathered together here amply attests to the truth of that claim, and makes it clear that Hecht was one of the finest poets, not just of his generation, but of the twentieth century.”
"In his centenary year, a collection of the Pulitzer Prize winner's poems celebrates the indispensable artistry of a writer who faced the history of his era with a 'clear-eyed mercy toward human weakness' (NYTBR) and 'absolute raw simplicity and directness' (Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate of England, 1984-1998). Anthony Hecht, whose output spanned eight volumes, beginning in 1954 with A Summoning of Stones, served as an infantryman in World War II and participated in the liberation of the death camps in Germany. His aesthetic--bound up with a need to see the best and worst of humankind with unsparing clarity--was shaped by the cadences of the King James Bible and great literature of the past. From the seven deadly sins to a Manhattan scene of Third Avenue in sunlight, or his poems of the many faces of Death ('Death the Oxford Don,' 'Death the Whore,' 'Death the Film Director'), Hecht's subject matter called him to a formal elegance inextricably woven with the dramatic force, thematic ambition, and powerful emotions in each poem. As the late J. D. McClatchy wrote, the rules of Anthony Hecht's art were 'moral principles meant finally to reveal the structure of human dilemmas and sympathies'"
