The Collected Poems of James Laughlin

In the literary world James Laughlin is best known as the publisher of New Directions Books. But he has also been a dedicated poet. His work is both modern - rich in technical experiment - and ancient - grounded in the Greek and Latin poets. Guy Davenport has called Laughlin "a very ironic Roman poet, and a very salty Greek one. Which is not to say that he imitates anybody, or offers plaster casts of antiquities. He is the youngest and most modern poet now writing in the United States. He is the real thing." Laughlin describes himself as a writer of light verse. He can be witty but underneath the wit there are often pungent truths about the human condition. His work is notable for its range of subject matter, the originality of its invention, his restoration of the classical tradition, his wordplay, his satire, and the intensity of his love poems. Few poets have dealt with the quandaries of love so acutely since Rochester and Herrick. "Who else today," asks the critic Marjorie Perloff, "writes such bittersweet, ironic, rueful, erotic, tough-minded, witty love poems, poems that run the gamut from ecstacy to loss"?
This volume collects Laughlin's poems from 1935 to 1993. His Random Stories and Random Essays are also published by Moyer Bell.

Laughlin, the distinguished publisher of New Directions, has spent a lifetime in literature. Following the advice of Ezra Pound, who suggested publishing as a career, he has seen into print such giants of modernism as Pound and William Carlos Williams. Along the way, he has written poetry, much of it touched by Pound's technique of mingling English verse with foreign languages, ancient and modern. Perhaps because of this, Laughlin's poetry did not grow far beyond a core of love poems marked by their conventionality and an assortment of verses written, so it seems, as daily sketches by an interested amateur. But successful work also emerges here: poems reminiscent of Cavafy ("I Saw Her First"); poems that presage the work of American surrealists like James Tate ("Busy Day"); work from Report On a Visit to Germany ; and the beautifully delicate long poem, "In Another Country." The size and scope of the book should not obscure Laughlin's more recent work, which carries the stamp of a writer with a gift for the poetry of loss. His poems about old age ("For the First Time," "Prisoner of Childhood," "Out in the Pasture") and the elegies for his son and wife move past a place Pound or anyone could have taken him.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Laughlin, the founder of the publishing house New Directions, is also a prolific, accomplished poet in his own right whose sharp, lyrical poems celebrate love and the pleasures (and pain) of living. His style is clearly influenced by some of the many poets he has championed and published since the 1940s: from H.D., there's a clean elegance of language; from W. C. Williams, a down-to-earth directness; and from Pound, a spacious cosmopolitanism and a knack for composing polylingual verses. Although he modestly states, "I prefer/ to build with plain brown bricks/ of common talk American talk... with me a poem/ is finally just/ a natural thing," these poems are the work of a man of keen intellectual and moral sophistication, who has read, thought, and lived deeply. This comprehensive collection is a fine showcase for a poet who also happens to be one of the foremost American literary publishers of our time. Recommended for collections of 20th-century poetry.
- Christine Sten strom, Shea & Gould Law Lib., New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.