Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (Phoenix Poets) - Hardcover

Ferry, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226244865 ISBN 13: 9780226244860

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1999

Synopsis

David Ferry's Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations provides a wonderful gathering of the work of one of the great American poetic voices of the twentieth century. It brings together his new poems and translations, collected here for the first time; his books Strangers and Dwelling Places in their entirety; selections from his first book, On the Way to the Island; and selections from his celebrated translations of the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh, the Odes of Horace, and of Virgil's Eclogues. This is Ferry's fullest and most resonant book, demonstrating the depth and breadth of forty years of a life in poetry.

"Though Ferry is perhaps best known for his eloquent translations of Horace and Virgil, "Of No Country I Know" demonstrates that he deserves acclaim for his own poetry as well."—Carmela Ciuraru, New York Times Book Review

About this title

About the Author

David Ferry was born in Orange, New Jersey in 1924. He is the author of a number of books of poetry and has translated several works from classical languages. Currently he is the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus of English at Wellesley College, as well as a visiting lecturer in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Boston University and a distinguished visiting scholar at Suffolk University.

His book of new and selected poems and translations, Of No Country I Know, published in 1999 by the University of Chicago Press, received the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress.

In 2011 he was awarded the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. Other awards include the Sixtieth Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, the Teasdale Prize for Poetry, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Award, and the William Arrowsmith Translation Prize from AGNI magazine. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998.

He won the 2012 National Book Award for Poetry for Bewilderment.

Reviews

Ferry's rapturously received translations, most recently The Eclogues of Virgil (Forecasts, June 28) and The Odes of Horace, have won the respect and admiration of peers and audience alike. The appearance of this uneven collection thus won't do much harm, and will introduce many new readers to the better poems here. Ferry tends to work in the academic-domestic mode, where the cares and rhetorics of study, family, travel and worship commingle, and occasionally produce a rebellious spark: "The answer to that question you asked?/ The whole world in His Hands? Fucked Up? Again?" Poems from his first two collections On the Way to the Island (1960) and Strangers (1983) seem very much of their respective eras, with the former's formalist impulses seeking an outlet in dailiness, and the latter's post-confessional ruminations forcing some embarrassing repetitions, as in "A Telephone Call": "A strong smell of dog, of my dog's death;/ My old dog is lying there, giving me lessons in dying.// I talked to my father, my father called me tonight:/ The sour breath of the telephone telling the truth." The collection is rounded out by poems and translations from the past decade, with a section of new work at the head. The uninitiated will be better served by seeking out the full-length translations, but many lines from the new poems suggest that Ferry's best work is yet to come: "The page is green. Like water words are drifting/ Across the notebook page on a day in June/ Of irresistible good weather. Everything's easy."
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0226244865
• ISBN 13: 9780226244860
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 310