Bewilderment

by Ferry, David

• ISBN13: 9780226244884
• ISBN10: 0226244881
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-09-14
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

To read David Ferry's Bewildermentis to be reminded that poetry of the highest order can be made by the subtlest of means. The passionate nature and originality of Ferry's prosodic daring works astonishing transformations that take your breath away. In poem after poem, his diction modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century. Ferry has fully realized both the potential for vocal expressiveness in his phrasing and the way his phrasing plays against-and with-his genius for metrical variation. His vocal phrasing thus becomes an amazingly flexible instrument of psychological and spiritual inquiry. Most poets write inside a very narrow range of experience and feeling, whether in free or metered verse. But Ferry's use of meter tends to enhance the colloquial nature of his writing, while giving him access to an immense variety of feeling. Sometimes that feeling is so powerful it's like witnessing a volcanologist taking measurements in the midst of an eruption. Ferry's translations, meanwhile, are amazingly acclimated English poems. Once his voice takes hold of them they are as bred in the bone as all his other work. And the translations in this book are vitally related to the original poems around them.

Author Biography

David Ferry is the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus of English at Wellesley College and also teaches at Suffolk University. In 2011, he received the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for his lifetime accomplishments.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Narcissus	p. 3
Found Single-Line Poems	p. 4
One Two Three Four Five	p. 5
Soul	p. 7
Untitled	p. 8
The Intention of Things	p. 9
Your Personal God (From Horace, Epistles 11.2)	p. 11
Dedication to His Book (Catullus 1)	p. 15
Brunswick, Maine, Early Winter, 2000	p. 16
Martial I.101	p. 19
Measure 100	p. 20
Ancestral Lines	p. 22
Entreaty	p. 23
October	p. 24
Spring (From Virgil, Georgics 11)	p. 25
Anguilla (Eugenio Montale, "L'Anguilla")	p. 26
In the Reading Room	p. 28
Coffee Lips	p. 31
Incubus	p. 32
At the Street Corner (Rilke, "Das Lied des Zwerges")	p. 33
The Late-Hour Poem	p. 34
At a Bar	p. 35
To Varus (Horace, Odes 1.18)	p. 37
Somebody in a Bar	p. 38
In Despair (Cavafy, "En Apognosi")	p. 39
Dido in Despair (From Virgil, Aeneid IV)	p. 40
Catullus 11	p. 42
Virgil, Aeneid II	p. 43
Thermopylae (Cavafy, "Thermopylae")	p. 44
Street Scene	p. 47
Willoughby Spit	p. 49
Everybody's Tree	p. 54
The Offering of Isaac (From Genesis A, Anglo-Saxon)	p. 61
Reading Arthur Gold's Poem "Chest Cancer"	p. 69
Reading Arthur Gold's "Trolley Poem"	p. 72
Reading Arthur Gold's Poem "On the Beach at Asbury"	p. 74
Reading Arthur Gold's Poem "Rome, December 1973"	p. 76
Virgil, Aeneid VI	p. 80
Reading Arthur Gold's Prose Poem "Allegory"	p. 82
Looking, Where Is the Mailbox?	p. 85
Orpheus and Eurydice (From Virgil, Georgia IV)	p. 89
Lake Water	p. 93
The White Skunk	p. 96
Virgil, Aeneid VI	p. 99
That Now Are Wild and Do Not Remember	p. 101
Untitled Dream Poem	p. 102
The Departure from Fallen Troy (From Virgil, Aeneid II)	p. 105
to where	p. 107
Resemblance	p. 108
Scrim	p. 111
Poem	p. 112
The Birds	p. 113
Notes	p. 115
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