Mayflies: New Poems and Translations - Hardcover

Wilbur, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151004692 ISBN 13: 9780151004690

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000

Synopsis

In 1989 Richard Wilbur published New and Collected Poems, a landmark volume that won that year's Pulitzer Prize. Now, ten years later, he has prepared a collection of all the poetry he has written in the intervening years, together with new translations of Molière (from Amphitryon) and Dante. These twenty-five poems reaffirm Wilbur's stature as one of our greatest living masters of verse.

About this title

Review:

Richard Wilbur, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his New and Collected Poems, has occasionally been pilloried for the twin sins of being too immaculate and too optimistic a poet. (Randall Jarrell, for example, noted that he "obsessively sees, and shows, the bright underside of every dark thing.") But surely these are peccadilloes when measured against Wilbur's formal mastery and unsentimental pathos. Both qualities are on display in Mayflies, which collects his work of the 1990s. Not surprisingly, there are more than a few gestures toward mortality, starting with the title poem's evocation of "those lifelong dancers of a day":

In somber forest, when the sun was low,
I saw from unseen pools a mist of flies
In their quadrillions rise
And animate a ragged patch of glow
With sudden glittering...

There is, perhaps, an extra quotient of Frost-like gloom to some of the work here. And indeed, "A Wall in the Woods: Cummington" seems like a deliberate updating of Frost's Yankee pastoralism, although Wilbur imparts an elegance all his own: "What is it for, now that dividing neither / Farm from farm nor field from field, it runs / Through deep impartial woods, and is trangressed / By boughs of pine or beech from either side?" Here and there Wilbur runs out of steam, or bogs down in his own gentility. But he's an appropriately flinty mouthpiece for Dante in "Canto XXV of the Inferno," which originally appeared in a 1998 round-robin translation, and poems like "For C." or "Icons" or "Fabrications" show him at the top of his game. Formalism could hardly find a more accomplished figure for its standard-bearer, and like the spider web that Wilbur celebrates in the latter poem, Mayflies handily demonstrates "the bright resilience of the frailest form." --James Marcus

About the Author:

Richard Wilbur is the recipient of many honors and awards, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters and the Academy of American Poets. His translations of Moliere and Racine are the theatrical standards performed around the world. He lives in rural Massachusetts and Key West, Florida.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0151004692
• ISBN 13: 9780151004690
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 20