Present

A collection of twenty-four poems that range from comic to classical, with one prose piece, "A Goya Reproduction," in which the author remembers how a library book introduced him to fine art

Richard Howard, one of our most difficult to please literary critics, writes that Alfred Corn's poetry is accessible and bold, without simplification. It is, he goes on to say, "The gossip of the gods!" In "Parallels," Corn imagines two mirrors facing one another: "Each, in mirroring mirroring in each, / Reflects contrary counterfeits of truth, / A glass-green emptiness in shrinking frames. / Contempt? It's nothing but reversed self-loathing. / Imagine, instead, an act of conciliation, / Someone recalling how much there was to praise." The richness of the image (I've been mulling it over for a while now) and all that it suggests about projections and reflections, typifies Corn's subtle sophistication. "A Marriage in the Nineties" is funny and tender, "After Neruda" is elemental and vivid, and "Stepson Elegy" is beautiful in its honest, halting way.