Anthony Hecht

Nominee for National Book Critics Circle Award, this volume contains many delights and some long poems. There is a European feel about Hecht's verse that is striking, partly due to the richness of the classical allusions, and partly due to the way Hecht handles autobiography. Poetry in the 20th century is very much shaped by the individualism of our times, but poetry that is in essence confessional, eccentric, and overly particularized quickly becomes...

The poetry of death. In Death of the Oxford Don, he writes: "Acquiring over years the appetite / And feeding habits of a parasite, / I live off the cold corpus of fine print, / Habited with black robes and heart of flint, / The word made flesh for me and me alone. / I gnaw and gnaw the satisfactory bone." With wood engravings by Leonard Baskin.

An exquisite book in which a series of poems about biblical characters -- "Samson", "Saul and David", "Judith", and so on -- provides the backdrop for other reflections on both the beauty and the darkness in contemporary life. We see ourselves in fresh light as Hecht illuminates the simililarites between our own age and the biblical world, and finds postmodern sadness in stories like that of Miriam, who announces in her poem, "I had a nice voice once,...