J.D. McClatchy’s selected poems, Division of Spoils, will appear from Arc in September. He teaches at Yale.
The saxophonist winds up ‘My Romance’, the song with a scar. In the red lacquer ceiling, the night’s raw throat, I can just make out lampshades the colour of a smoker’s breath. One is at our table. Across sits a woman in tiny furs from before the war, the mouth of one gnawing on the tail of the other, like comets. A sudden brightness on stage, a flaring spot, flashes...
Hofmannsthal’s is a reputation in abeyance, and I am content that it should be so. There is a limit to how far it can fall – though in the English Sprachraum it was perhaps never all...
This Collected Poems is not a ‘Complete Poetry’. It omits Merrill’s trilogy of book-length poems, The Changing Light at Sandover, as well as a number of uncollected or...
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