After Homer Poems

by Filkins, Peter

• ISBN13: 9780807615058
• ISBN10: 0807615056
• Edition: 00
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-02-17
• Publisher: George Braziller Inc.

Summary

Written in a voice both direct and timely, After Homer speaks to our historical moment in a way that connects with a larger sense of our time passing. At times personal, at times political, the poems remain anchored in a formal complexity that delivers clarity and nuance to the ideas set forth within them. Whether writing about the sinking of the Lusitania, the death of Chekhov, his father's passing, or the death of the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, Filkins reminds us that, no matter the loss, "poetry will survive," helped by the studied meditation he brings to it. Meanwhile, at the beginning and end of the book, lyric renditions of brief passages of the Iliad underscore Homer's notion that there is "nothing sadder than man" is as true today as it was for the Greeks.

Author Biography

Peter Filkins is the author of What She Knew (1998). His translation of Ingeborg Bachmann's collected poems, Songs in Flight, received an Outstanding Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. He is also the recipient of fellowships awarded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Millay Colony. Filkins teaches at Simon's Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, Massachusetts

Table of Contents

After Homer: Iliad, Book XVII	17	(4)
I
Bottle	21	(1)
The Salamander	22	(1)
The Manifest	23	(2)
Austrian Pastoral	25	(1)
The Death of Chekhov	26	(2)
Dominion	28	(1)
Christmas Blues	29	(1)
Anthem for the Victims	30	(1)
Watercress Market, 1851	31	(2)
A Nightmare	33	(1)
The Rescue	34	(3)
II
The Venus of Willendorf	37	(8)
III
The Burn	45	(1)
In Weather	46	(1)
The New Year	47	(5)
The Ride	52	(1)
Blueberrying	53	(4)
IV
Ending	57	(1)
In Lieu of Flowers	58	(1)
Elegy for Joseph Brodsky	59	(5)
The Ark	64	(1)
The Glass Blower	65	(1)
To a Suicide	66	(1)
The Fly	67	(2)
Owl	69	(1)
Two Horses	70	(1)
The Light	71	(7)
EPILOGUE
After Homer: Iliad, Book XII	75	(3)
Notes	78